National Office Blog

Bright and early this morning, the National Office welcomed two new members to it's team: our summer interns, Purnima Venkat and Carlyn Cowen. As full-time members of our staff this summer, they'll be focusing on updating our website, planning the summer institute, building our future project database and maybe even a little blogging, if we're lucky.

Check out their bios - we couldn't be more excited to have them as a part of our team!

Purnima Venkat:

Purnima holds a post graduate degree in Social Work from the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai India. She also holds a degree in Human Rights Law from the National Law School, India University, Bangalore. She has worked in the sector of micro-finance in India for a year and is interested in livelihoods and micro-enterprises. She has been actively involved in various projects of relief work, disaster preparedness issues and aspects of social security of working classes during her course of study and work.

Carlyn Cowen:

Carlyn is a senior at the University of North Carolina- Chapel Hill, pursuing degrees in International Studies and Philosophy. She is currently writing her thesis on community-based international development projects in Africa. She has also studied international development at the Universidad Nacional in Costa Rica and simultaneously worked with orphanages in the country. She has worked with the Full Belly Project to develop a resource database of developing countries and will be working with them on an economic impact project in the Philippines this summer.