Check it out!!!

People, don't forget to check ted.com for the videos we've seen at the Summit and many other videos to inspire us. Don't forget to ckeck the one from William Kamkwamba, an african boy who has built a windmill system for his community in South Africa. I'm reading his book right now (I got it at the Summit!!) it is called "The Boy who Harnessed the Wind", very interesting and motivating!!! Cheers from Colombia!!

A brief testimonial for my host LC in Brazil:

An Internship in Brazil is so diverse yet full of balance! The exquisite gastronomy, the affectionate culture, the amazing people and the exhilarating adventure throughout the nation and beyond, entice me to pro-long my stay here. I have truly enjoyed myself and have gained valuable professional advancement through the exposure and training which I have obtained through the dedicated team at Artemisia and of course, my boss, David Hertz at Gastromotiva. Both the professional network and friendships fostered here are truly priceless towards the advancement into the next phase of my life. My stay in Brazil, the penetration into the Latin culture and being half-Latino myself, of speaking mediocre Portuguese and living the culture alive; that is exactly what I never thought I needed in this crazy chase of life.

Impact

Recently I've been doing 2 things which made me even more excited about my job:

I've called around 20 entrepreneurs to ask what was the impact of the intern they had in their organization. I spent quite a lot of time to find 20 very busy entrepreneurs and take 10 minutes of their time, but it became worthed when I started hearing things like:

"The only problem we had is that our intern became crucial to my organization."

"The intern created tools which improve our efficiency and will be used by all future generations"

"We could see the intern was not only commited, she had passion for the job, and always wanted to do more"

At the same time, I was collecting testimonials written by the interns who worked for 6 months in those organizations, and read some stories like these:

"I realized it's possible to cause positive impact and be financially sustainable at the same time"

"The internship changed my career path"

"I understood it's possible to apply my technical skills to social development"

The quotes talk by themselves, and it made me very happy to realize I work for a program which impacts people as much as impacts organizations.

(if you are an AIESEC members, you can see more intern stories here)

Creating social change in China

We have received the following blog contribution from a Chinese participant of the Artemisia Social-Business Competition, Melody Chang. Due to internet censorship, Melody was not able to post herself, and asked us to share her thoughts here.

"Participating in Artemisia Social Business Competition has been one of the most valuable learning experiences for me. Social responsibility and youth development and many other world issues and topics have been some of the motivations for us to pursue and to launch our social business "Youth&Leader" (for more information, please visit http://www.youthandleader.org/ ), but also to make impact to the society and especially youth for they are the future of tomorrow's world.

It's a stimulating environment and team group. Everyone is of strong team work spirit and is with open-minded ideas and strong execution ability. I have to say I am really lucky to the opportunity to work with them, not to mention about how much we have learned from mentors, Henrique Bussacos and Howard Weinstein who I am sincerely thankful to for their efforts. Not only have I learnt from those great people and preeminent leaders of different fields, but also be inspired from the experiences to communicate with them and actually grow under their guidance, which would also be the drive for us to further develop our idea and put it into practice.

Youth&Leader's mission is to provide integrated platform and career opportunities via online learning platforms and connections to social networks that broaden the ability of our youth to participate in ways to combat poverty at the same time to provide the resources necessary to empower them to build a brighter future and make positive changes in their communities.

Recently we have held an event of Andrew Fiddaman's speech on entrepreneurship at Renmin University in Beijing, Mainland China. Andrew is the Managing Director of Youth Business International (YBI), one of The Prince of Wales Charities. Youth Business International (YBI) operates through a network of locally based Youth Business Programmes in 39 countries that help young people start their own business. Andrew is also on the advisory boards of various organizations dealing with leadership skills, enterprise development and social responsibility and is a member of the UN Economic Commission for Europe’s Team of Specialists on Entrepreneurship. Many of (the participating students) have already talked to me about the excitement at the time and after the event. I believe it would be one of the wonderful memory and learning experience for them to truly witness the charm and brightness of a leader from international level and to be encouraged to strive for excellence and fulfill our dreams. This is a start, and Youth&Leader would like to invite and gather more leaders and young students in the near future."

A letter to Artemisia

This is a letter that I've sent to Artemisia and now I'm posting here to share with you all.

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Dear Rob, Carol and all Artemisia team,

I’ve been thinking in what would be the best way to thank you all for being part of my life so, I decided to write, sharing with you what this experience close to Artemisia mean to me.

Since 2001 I’m looking for to build my career based on sustainable development values: helping people to do best choices or helping companies in change their way to do their business in a sustainable way. I started in CSR, the first concept I knew, and then my knowledge have been growing through my studies and experiences.

When I became an AIESEC member, I was leaving behind two years studying to public contests to enter in a big company like Petrobras or similar ones ‘cause I saw in there the only possible way to achieve my professional goals because I was tired to search in Belo Horizonte and don’t find an opportunity. Almost all my relatives and friends tried to make me give this path up because they used to say that “idealism” is for rich people or to the ones who wants to “die in hungry”, because, according to them, I couldn’t go on involved with this “social and environmental issues” because no one care about it enough to give me a job.

Only one person believed in me then and he always supported me in fighting for the things I believe, specially during those hard days and because of him I don’t have a thing to regret about it when I look back.

When I applied to Artemisia Sustainability Challenge in 2007 I didn’t know the difference it would make in my life. After 3 months of hard work I left that CONAL Conference with a lot more than a proud winner feeling: I had discovered a new way to do “the right thing”, a new way to see world’s problem, people to inspire me to bring my hopes back, and a “life mission” that would turn into my life-saver some months later.

One year later, in last october/november, after a tsunami on my personal life, I was motivated to apply to “Ser Más” initiative to an internship funded by Artemisia. Now, another year later, I’m here to say “THANK YOU” to Artemisia. My internship was one of the most amazing experiences I’ve ever had. México is an inspiring country, with sweet people but my experience in New Ventures was priceless. The opportunity to work close to a visionary and well succeed Ashoka fellow and all New Ventures team, so young and competent people, added much to me.

This experience helped me to open my mind to see new solutions for old issues and gave me new projects, new wings and new hopes.

My next steps include more experience in sustainable business development, a master course in entrepreneurship and a career helping people to grow in a sustainable way.

This is the Artemisia’s legacy in my life and I’d like to share with you because I think that feedbacks are important.

Entrepreneurial motivation and process

I became an AIESEC alumnus in 2005, after 5 exciting years which included being LCP in Rio de Janeiro, MCVP ER in Brazil and ABN AMRO Global Exchange Partnership Manager. While most of my team members in both the MC and LC were also heading for the future through very different paths, we had one certainty: we wanted to work together again in the future!!!

Some of us actually started to get very serious about it in 2008. We had been working for other organizations for some time, and really needed to create something of our own, using chaordic principles to strive to solve some of the world's toughest problems. We did not know exactly what, although we were sure it should build on our experiences. We did not know exactly when, apart from "soon". Then we called this organization a KOAN: we could feel it, but not exactly explain it!!!

Our process evolved to listing different things we were interested in tackling along with our skills: "Where your talents and world's needs cross, there lies your vocation", said Aristotle. The list was long and would be really difficult to prioritize and get started. To make things, I was attending business school in Madrid, Henrique attending the KaosPilots in Denmark, others doing long hours in consulting or banking back in Brazil...

Enter Artemisia
Nothing better to get you started than engaging with a third party, committing to deadlines while getting just the right support. The Artemisia Social-Business Ventures Competition came just in time. Furthermore, I needed to submit a business idea to my entrepreneurship track in the MBA as well.

The initial idea of KOANedu was suggested by Henrique. He had met the founder of QiFang in Shanghai and got excited about the idea of P2P lending for education. I got thrilled, as I had done a case study on Prosper couple of months before for my MBA. But most importantly, we had felt the same pain: both of us struggled to finance our education. We were very committed to KOANedu's vision:
"Youth access to higher education is a matter of ambition and will, not financial resources".

The rest is history: we have worked very hard to meet Artemisia's deadlines, despite being in different countries and timezones. We got feedback from lots of other AIESEC alumni, classmates, friends and potential partners, on top of great coaching from Artemisia's network of entrepreneurs. We were a finalist at the SEEC social business plan competition last July in Spain. We have pitched to angels last September in Sao Paulo. We have an attorney who will help us incorporate the business pro-bono. We have another 3 great AIESEC alumni about to join the management team, and some key individuals as prospects for our Board of Advisory.

In summary: WE GOT STARTED!!! And it is a very exciting journey!!!

Cruisin'

...around the world? Sure, that's part of the Artemisia experience - different people from around the world are brought together to foster and work on common ideas. I am not here to elaborate more on how awesome this whole thing is, especially when I haven't even arrived to my destination city and start my internship yet.

What I'm talking about is cruising on the net as a spokesperson of the many initiatives, ideas and concepts that come along with being an Artemisia intern. Yes we love it already, obviously, but how do we make it big and as interactive as possible other than, say, blogging about our experiences?

This is not by any means to convey a negative feeling about the blog. Don't get me wrong! I've started blogging in 1999, creating from scratch blog designs and only recently dropped from updating my blog. I was too lazy a high school student to bother keeping a hand-written journal, and loves the way one can play around with blog designs and meet people from all walks of life online via blogging. I'm just curious to find out who reads this blog, how they'd found it, and what we could learn from the people who stopped by and read our thoughts.

I guess I am particularly intrigued by the question since I'd be working in the communications and media area in my internship, and online marketing is obviously indispensable in the whole shebang. Also, I've seen more than a few blogs which, despite a lot of organized effort and steady updates, somehow just didn't make it to the newsfeed of the targeted group we were trying to reach. The blog my team and I worked on during my MC term was exactly one of those.

No offense to any of the contributors here, as this blog is already seeing a constant feed of updates, and most importantly, updates of various kinds- Francis shares her feelings on her first days in Brazil; Rob talks about the ongoing challenges and cool facts about his work; news from Romania and Artemisia contest finalists, etc.

I just thought the below blog post, via www.chrisbrogan.com (currently one of the net's biggest, larger-than-virtual-life social media gurus), proposes some of the answers into looking at the challenge. Not that we are blogging for a living. But perhaps it's quick tip if ever we are looking into increasing virtual exposure for ourselves, or for our work?

http://www.chrisbrogan.com/how-to-blog-almost-every-day/