Lisa Sandoval, MPA ’18

Intern, Communities for a Sustainable Monterey County (CSMC)

Summer 2017

Communities for a Sustainable Monterey County, or CSMC, was the object of a lot of my attention last spring, as I had worked with three other MIIS students on a consulting project for the organization during Dr. Alfredo Ortiz’ class on organizational sustainability for social change organizations. I thought it would be interesting to work with CSMC over the summer to help move the spring’s process forward and assess the effects of our consultancy. 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. Our main point of contact, and mine for the summer, was the leader of the Monterey chapter of CSMC and who had responsibility for one of the organization’s main goals, that of increasing community engagement. My work for the internship was to assist her 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. I learned more about all-volunteer organizations and the way things work when all the work is done in and around people’s other commitments, as well as the amount of dedication required in this situation.  A very enriching emotional effect of my experience was getting to know a few members of CSMC better, which gave me a much greater sense of connection to this area.

I was also able, as I had hoped, to be able to assess what effects the spring consultancy had had on the organization and 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 our point person’s thinking about community engagement for CSMC and that together we had created a clear and effective blueprint of immediate steps forward. The deliverables we created continued to appear useful this summer. Our contact person was able to use what we had come up with while tweaking the plan as she deemed necessary.

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