Summer Internship Series: EdVillage

Catalina Diez (cd2603 MPA 2013)
EdVillage
Washington DC, USA

This is an article of our Summer Internship Series.
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During the past summer I did my internship in a local NGO called EdVillage (www.edvillage.org). EdVillage is an international education nonprofit organization. It identifies and supports transformational school models and education entrepreneurs around the world that seek to provide a high-quality, university preparatory education to children from economically disadvantaged communities. They do this by providing world-class school leadership training and specialized school start-up and improvement services. Their current work is focused mainly in South Africa and India.


My main duties during the internship were researching about topics related to school principal training and private schools in different countries of the world. The research I performed was an input for EdVillage’s future work in South Africa and India. I was also in charge of developing the first version of a school start-up manual.

My major accomplishments were the creation of a database with information of Principal Training Programs around the world, the development of a brief on the South African School’s Law, the creation of a School Start-Up Handbook and researching about potential funding sources in the US and abroad. These projects were useful for different members of the organization as an input for the projects they were working in.

This experience will be very useful for my future career plans, as I want to go back to Chile and focus my work on improving the educational sector of the country. One of my future plans is to work on creating a good quality school for low-income students, so the research I performed was very useful as a starting point.

One useful thing to know before pursuing an internship with this organization is how the US Charter School system works and what are the main networks of charter schools in the country, to have an idea of the foundations of EdVillage’s work. For me, it would have been very useful to read some papers about it before starting the internship.

More details of my internship can be found here.