Communities for a Sustainable Monterey County (CSMC) Internship
Summer 2017
Communities for a Sustainable Monterey County, or CSMC, had been the object of a lot of my attention last spring, as I had worked with three other MIIS students on the consulting project for the organization. CSMC is a nonprofit organization that acts as an umbrella, supporting the environmental sustainability work of eight local action groups based in the various cities of Monterey County and two region-wide programs, hour-banking (a system of exchanging services with others) and community gardens. The group project had gone surprisingly well, with each member of my team doing excellent work, all of us managing to be responsive to the needs of CSMC, and CSMC finding our feedback and recommendations accurate and useful.
Since our main contact at CSMC, Laurie, was keen to continue a relationship with MIIS students, I thought it would be interesting to work with her over the summer to help move the process forward and assess the effects of our spring consultancy. Laurie was the leader of the Monterey chapter of CSMC and had volunteered to take responsibility for one of the organization’s main goals, that of increasing community engagement. My work for the internship was to assist Laurie and the Community Engagement Team she had formed in executing a mechanism for collecting and compiling volunteer profiles and matching them to the determined needs of CSMC. The actual experience turned out to be different than I expected; instead of making as much progress on our projects as I had hoped, I learned more about the nature of CSMC and came to a better understanding of their obstacles to progress, as well as learning more about myself.
The first thing I learned more about was the way things work in an organization where everyone does their work in and around their other commitments. CSMC is an all-volunteer organization with no formally stated goal to gain paid staff, but some of the members believe a paid staff member would be critical to helping the organization function more efficiently and effectively. I too, was doing my work in and around my full-time job – putting in a few hours in the evenings, on weekends in coffee shops, and slipping off during the workday for an occasional meeting with Laurie and other members of her team. Working in this way, progress took more time. And yet, I gained a certain amount of admiration for the people who keep the work of CSMC going. I understood the way in which working towards protecting the environment was an essential facet of the lives of many of CSMC’s members, such that they could find a way to remain connected to it in spite of other responsibilities.
The Community Engagement Team encountered a setback that took us by surprise as we started the process of collecting volunteer profiles, starting with the people who currently made up CSMC. We had decided to create an activity out of filling out our new volunteer information form by pairing people in the organization and having them interview each other to fill out the form. Laurie then emailed the leaders of several local action groups to get the contact list of their most involved members. We discovered to our surprise that some people “opted out” of the exercise. None of us expected this. I did not anticipate that people would think they had the option to opt-out! I was not able to find out, before my engagement was over, why those people didn’t want to participate. I realized that I was still viewing CSMC through the lens of the other places I had worked – nonprofit institutions of higher education – which, of course, function very differently: hierarchical structures, paid staff relying on their jobs for livelihood, process-focused, and a sense of high stakes. CSMC was different because no one could make anyone do anything, communication was more challenging (no office location), and strong-willed intentions pulled the organization in various directions at once. Yet I found it surprisingly hard to shake off my mental imprint of the places I had worked previously and simply see CSMC for what it was.
One way in which CSMC did not match my expectations was that it did not have an organizational directory of contact information. I took it for granted that an organization would have a list of key people with their phone numbers and email addresses typed up to hand out to new people and for current people to keep handy. So I set out to create one. Along the way I realized that some people might not be comfortable having their personal contact information on the list for anyone to access. CSMC’s makeup as a conglomeration of various subgroups with their own goals and meeting schedules makes it difficult to meet everyone who is regularly involved. Unlike the organizations I was used to, the lines between who was a member of CSMC and who was not were blurry. People could be involved without having a formal position and could help out in many capacities large and small, long-term and temporary. I pondered who should be allowed to have a complete directory, who would not need it, and who might need a partial one. This questioning led me to create a constituent data use policy for CSMC that includes a clause about internal use of member and volunteer contact information. In the future, I know I need to learn what other all-volunteer organizations are doing to protect member contact information while enabling effective internal communications.
Being without my student team from the spring turned out to be more of a challenge than I expected. I had joined my project group in order to work with another student in particular, who I felt had good leadership skills, went about life with enthusiasm and excitement, had great ideas, and was not much inhibited by fear. I felt that I would partner well with this person, since my strengths are more in the area of thoroughness, thinking things through, problem solving, and seeing all sides of an issue, but not so much inventing new ideas or inspiring others to work on them with me. I found it hard to be without this student during this engagement and a little disappointed that I didn’t on my own exhibit the same type of leadership that she did. I’m sure that being at the end of my pregnancy, experiencing greater fatigue than usual, affected my performance but that could not be the whole explanation. I realized that my team’s success in the spring was truly the product of all our intelligences combined. The lesson brought home for me was of the value of teamwork and partnering with people who have complementary skills to mine, and, perhaps for the first time in my life, understanding how several people can accomplish some things better than one alone.
Towards the end of my engagement it really struck me how valuable it is to be connected to people in my community. I moved to the Monterey Peninsula in January to be a student at MIIS and did not expect to form any relationships with locals – just earn my degree, get a job elsewhere, and leave. But getting to know members of the Community Engagement Team was a delight. A very memorable day was that of a meeting we had at the home of one member of the team. It turned out that this woman and her husband kept bees in their backyard. After the meeting, the husband presented us with a jar of their honey, which turned out to be some of the most delicious honey I’ve ever tasted. They took us out back to see the hives and their garden and fruit trees, explained how they use a biodegradable dish soap and collect their dish water for the outdoor plants and use an efficient drip watering system for their fruit trees. I felt enriched by this experience – it was heartening to see how they lived and I left feeling encouraged to keep doing the things I do that I consider environmentally sound, like using glass jars instead of plastic containers.
Finally, at the beginning of the summer I had hoped, through this experience, to be able to assess what effects our engagement had on the organization and what the limitations of it were, as well as how well we accomplished our goal of leaving the organization ready to continue the work on its own. My assessment was that our consultancy organized Laurie’s thinking about community engagement for CSMC and that together we had created a clear and effective blueprint of immediate steps forward. We had also crafted some very useful deliverables, such as a volunteer interest form, that continued to appear useful this summer. Laurie was able to use what we had come up with while tweaking the plan as she deemed necessary, such as by starting a catalogue of CSMC’s needs. I was pleased that my team had worked with Laurie and her team in such a practical and responsive way that she could move forward apparently seamlessly after our semester had finished. The clearest obstacle to progress, in my view, was the fact that the president and perhaps a few other people on the central steering committee were not actively involved in the Community Engagement Team. I perceived a split forming between the team working on community engagement and some of the rest of the organization. When it comes to implementing new procedures for engaging volunteers, this divide – if it exists as I see it – may prevent Laurie’s work from impacting the entire organization.