Here it is : the end of my IDRP. I have arrived to the end of the required 40 days placement on the 1st of October, but will continue working for Flourish Girl for few more weeks. During this placement, I learned a lot. I learned about myself but also about others, about development, about what it is to run an organisation and about new and existent skills.

Even tough I thought I would have more time to accomplish things within Flourish Girl, I can say that I am happy about the content I produced and the things I learned. My main goal when I began this IDRP was to find a placement where I would bring something particular to the organisation I would chose and at the same time learn from them. I wanted it to be a partnership where everyone could benefit in a way and it is what I found and created with Flourish Girl’s CEO.

First of all, I can say that I am proud of the content I produced on the organisation’s social media. It reflects both my vision and the vision of Flourish Girl and will most likely be useful for me in the future if I want to specialise in communication for example. I learned new techniques of communication as well as new theories as I combined my work with my “Stakeholders Relations and Emergent Medias” class.
I feel that I put my time there to great use as we both benefited from my existent and new skills.

In terms of new knowledge, I learn a lot about what is it to manage an organisation in development and I can say that it benefitted Flourish Girl’s CEO as well by giving her the opportunity to reflect on her position and vision. As I was her first employee (other employees are only casual workers) dedicated to the organisation, it provided her an experience to manage me and I could also learn from that experience.

Lastly, I would like to say that my IDRP redefined my vision of development and asserted some of the projects and visions I had in mind for my future career and life. I am now certain that I would love to work somewhere I can be useful to the women’s cause and in the development field. I also discovered that I wouldn’t mind, even like, working with young people such as teenagers.

I hope everyone’s IDRP this year has been great, full of discoveries and helpful for them!

Thank you again for reading me,

See you soon!

Hello and welcome back to my IDRP blog,

Today, I am going to tell you about my first experience on the field as a development worker and my first time in a classroom where I wasn’t a student!

During my first days working at Flourish Girl, I had the opportunity to come help run a program at a school in Burwood. Very excited by the proposition but also a little bit afraid as it would be a completely new experience for me, I accepted.
Few days after, I am in the car with the other girls running the program, being briefed and told that everything is going to be great.
Fast forward the preparations of the room, the activities and the team, I am now facing 67 year 10 girls, helping running a program on mental health and well-being.

If I was really intimidated at first, the day and the program went very smoothly. I did well and the team was very satisfied with my work and even surprised how well I did for my first time! During the day, I discovered a new aspect of development that I never really was interested in : Working with children and/or teenagers. I never tried to learn more about it, but now that I know that I enjoy working with teenagers, I think that it could be a sector of development I could be interested in working in.

This experience taught me new skills, like how to be charismatic enough to be listened by teenagers, how to run activities without any troubles and how to manage the troubles. It was very interesting and challenging especially for someone like me who isn’t the most comfortable with public speaking. It loved discovering that aspect of myself that I didn’t know about and feeling that only one day taught me so much really motivated me for the rest of the journey!

In conclusion, it’s important not to be afraid of trying new things as it can teach us so much! And even if we are not the best at our first try, it is worth to try again in order to progress.

Thank you for reading me ,

See you in my next blog!

Hello and welcome to my second blog post about my IDRP’s journey at Flourish Girl.

On this blog, I am going to explain you how I find and secured my placement.

It all began during Summer 2018 where I was looking for an organisation to work for in order to complete my IDRP. Without much specificities in mind except the fact that I wanted to work to help women, I was searching but nothing convinced me much and I did not feel ready to work for a big organisation, as I had in mind the idea to work for a young organisation that would really need my help and my skills in order to grow.

It is only at the end of the summer that I met Mandy, the CEO of Flourish Girl, a young organisation but already established in the Melbourne region, aiming at helping young girls with their mental health and well-being. Their school programs interested me and I met the CEO to apply as an assistant, explaining my goal to complete my IDRP for my master. We were getting along well and had similar opinions and vision for the organisation and she accepted to give me a chance to work with her.

Fast forward to May, nothing had been signed and I was almost late to submit my WIL agreement and proposal to RMIT. The difficult part was to settle a time with the CEO and with RMIT to finalise the papers, while we were all being very busy at this period of the year. I ended up submitting my WIL agreement with not much troubles but struggled a little with the proposal which had to be perfectly representative of my skills and the part I would play within the organisation.

This blog post shows you that it is important to keep continuing and believing in yourself, finding a place to work is not easy to do but I managed to make it work at the end and so will you!

See you in my next blog!

Welcome to my first blog post!

I will write here about my International Development Research Project (IDRP) that I will conduct in 2019 for my last year of master at RMIT Melbourne.

For this project, I will work as an assistant at Flourish Girl which is an organisation based in Melbourne but operating all around Australia which focuses on “empowering teenage girls to become unstoppable women in today’s world”. My role will be to help and be by the side of the CEO and Founder Mandy Kota to develop her organisation through various tasks, mostly administrative, which will allow me to learn more about the business aspect of development and about what needs to be done as a CEO of a newly born organisation. My tasks will encompass administration, logistics and communication which I am sure will grant me new skills that will be very helpful in my future career.

I chose to work a Flourish Girl because helping women have always been a cause very close to my heart and it is for me an opportunity to develop this enthusiasm into something concrete and helpful for the society. I am actually very excited to begin this placement and very happy to have found someone like-minded to work with me and help me grow during this project. I am confident that I can learn a lot during my IDRP on the business aspect of development but also a lot about myself and the women surrounding me on a daily basis.

My first goal during this IDRP would be to learn and help as much as possible Flourish Girl to become an official non for profit organisation. It is going to be an interesting journey that will probably teach me a lot about the process of creating a new non for profit organisation. I am looking forward to learn the process as an insiders and living the whole journey with Mandy Kota. I will try to document it during my blogs later on!

For now, I am finalising the first semester and the paperworks linked to the IDRP in order to begin my journey. I will write a Blog Post about how I found this placement and what I needed to do to secure it, the whole process.

See you in my next blog!