Every year, TWF is fortunate to have a cohort of talented passionate interns join us, usually for a few weeks or months. Our interns come from the far corners of the world as well as from local HK schools and universities and work alongside the TWF team on our existing community programmes, research and best practice guides, grant applications and fundraising initiatives.
For example, since January, 20 terrific interns have passed through our doors, coming from institutions ranging from the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the University of Hong Kong to the University of Edinburgh, Georgetown University, the University of Pennsylvania and Yale University, while our more junior interns this year have come from Crystal Springs Uplands School and HK International School.
We are naturally very proud when our interns go on to do amazing things and extremely touched if they acknowledge TWF's part in inspiring them to make a difference in the world.
In the words of Trinity Donohugh (now in her final year at Cheltenham Ladies College) who interned with us in the summer of 2015, "It was largely thanks to interning at The Women's Foundation and working on their Girls Go Tech programme that opened my eyes to the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields and led me to launch the GirlsforCS project and cofound Khonaa - an online store connecting local craftsmakers in Myanmar with consumers worldwide.
I initially created GirlsforCS to encourage more girls to study computer science, through running coding workshops in local schools around Cheltenham. Recognising the importance of computer literacy skills to students and workers everywhere, I looked for ways to export this knowledge abroad and settled on podcasts as the most accessible medium, given mobile penetration in Asia. While GirlsforCS originally targeted computer literacy skills for girls, our content and user base have expanded over the past two years. We now offer podcasts in five languages that cover basic health awareness, economic theories, and environmental conservation, and we plan to add more content as we expand to Cambodia, Vietnam, India, Malawi, Zambia and other countries over the next year.
At the same time, I co-founded Khonaa to solve the problem of Internet access in rural communities which became apparent while trying to scale GirlsforCS. We are currently working with 40 craftsmakers across Myanmar, and with proceeds from our website and stores in Yangon, Hong Kong and London (US$12,500 over the past two years), we fund monthly internet costs for students in rural villages and volunteer teacher subsidies at two monastic schools in Yangon."
Of course, Trinity has set a very high bar but regardless of where they end up and what they end up doing, on behalf of all of us at TWF: a big thank you to all of our interns for their avid interest in, and energetic contributions to, our work and and we wish them all the very best for the future.
Warm regards
