What makes us qualified?
By Dana
So what makes us qualified to consult? Maybe it is simply our curiosity, our determination to learn more, and our desire to help. Maybe it is our passion and enthusiasm for the issue and the work being done. At least this can be our starting point.
In all of my international volunteer experience before business school, the groups and organizations I worked with were always very intentional about acknowledging that we, as Americans, were outsiders trying to help another community in another country. In most cases, we knew little of the language or the history or the culture. In one group, someone posed the question in this way: what makes us qualified to help? With these volunteer experiences, we emphasized that we needed to come with a willingness to listen and learn from the community about what their needs were, and that we were simply giving our time (and sometimes physical strength to projects like school-building) to help support those needs.
Many of the same challenges in those other volunteer experiences are true here as well: coming into this project my team and I had little context for the history of the country, the culture, and the nuances in gender dynamics and how this may affect the ways people talk about finances. Admittedly, all these things made me a little nervous, and I found myself doubting the value we could bring to this community.
The question I kept coming back to was this: What makes us qualified to consult with these organizations?
In our first call with our client in Moldova, we were asked why we wanted to work on this specific project. We all gave answers that pointed to our passion for the economic empowerment of women. I myself worked in several nonprofits focusing on women’s issues: a women’s center, my college sexual assault resource center, a social enterprise for teen mothers, and a recovery program for survivors of sex trafficking. In many of them I read about or saw first-hand the impact of financial independence. There were many stories, from women who were able to leave abusive situations to those of women who simply felt more confident about themselves because they could earn their own living.
Throughout the call she continuously expressed her gratitude to us for picking this project as it is a topic that is she is passionate about, too. We felt an instant connection to her and her personal purpose. That was the foundation for the rest of our conversation, and potentially the anchor for the duration of this engagement. Beyond this, it will certainly be helpful to lean on the expertise, connections, and advice from professors and other classmates in both project and client relationship management.
As I reflect on the project ahead and my other cross-cultural experiences, I find that a common theme is simply the fact that we are giving our time, and that is meaningful. And, in this case, we are also giving our ideas—that outsider perspective that many lean social impact organizations need and desire. While I am still a little nervous, and still wonder what value we will actually bring, I believe in the team, our varying skill sets and strengths, and our ability to take what we’ve learned in our various MBA experiences and apply them to this project.
So what makes us qualified to consult?
Maybe it is simply our curiosity, our determination to learn more, and our desire to help. Maybe it is our passion and enthusiasm for the issue and the work being done. At least this can be our starting point.