National Office Blog

Nourish's National Board met on 1/14. Here's some of the important happenings:

New Board Members:

• Lee Buck, an Entrepreneur in the Raleigh Durham area joined the National Board. He will be serving a two year term.
• Pallavi Garg, from the University of Texas at Austin joined the Board as Nourish's first student-board member. She will be serving a one year term.

Committees and Task Forces

• The Board Recruitment Committee, led by Joel Thomas, is preparing "job descriptions" for new potential board members, as well as a Board Rotation Plan.
• The Metrics Task Force, led by Marcia Angle, is working with the staff to make headway towards providing preliminary metrics for Chapters and Project leaders.
• Pallavi Garg will be launching a Nourish Alumni Committee for the purpose of collecting and organizing our alumni's information and beginning a discussion on ways to keep them involved with Nourish's mission.

For the Budget

• The Give the Gift of Nourish Campaign was a huge success, raising over $6,000.
• In December, the Park Foundation chose to support the National Office with a grant — exciting!

Nourish's University of Pennsylvania chapter has selected their 2010 summer project! They will be working with an organization in Uganda called NACWOLA, the National Community of Women Living with AIDS. The participants will be assisting them in setting up a Paper-Making business and training a group of 10 women on the skills required, who will further train hundreds of other women in NACWOLA's 60,000+ network. This paper will further be used to create Memory Books which assist these women in communicating their HIV positive status to their children and help the children to cope with the prospect of losing a parent.

Danielle Berfond, UPenn's chapter leader, expressed the chapter's reasons for picking this project. "We are very excited to work on this project because of its ability to impact such a large group of people, as it not only provides jobs and thus income for women living with AIDS, but also has the potential to impact their childrens' lives and educate them on the disease. We are looking forward to watching the entire process of starting the business and trainings, as part of our work with them will involve documenting the process both for further trainings and future marketing materials. And we are especially excited to go into the communities later into the project and start taking pictures and writing down the stories for women who are illiterate. The future potential for the business itself, in perhaps selling to US scrapbooking groups or using the paper for other products in the region, makes us believe that we are contributing seed money to a scalable, successful business idea as well as generating huge social impact."

This Tuesday, February 2nd 2010, the Triangle Professionals are hosting a networking event! This is a great opportunity to meet and chat with the area’s successful business people. Triangle Professionals are holding the event in support Nourish and will be accepting donations at the door. The event will held from 6-8 p.m. at the West End Wine Bar in Durham, NC. For more information and to RSVP, visit http://www.triangleprofessionals.com/rsvp-form/

In response to the January 12th earthquake in Haiti, Nourish’s chapter at UNC-Chapel Hill held a special fundraiser dedicated to providing relief.

Through their January 20th Hunger Lunch, selling rice, beans and corn bread, and also thanks to contributions from the Campus Y, the UNC chapter was able to raise $1,966.05.
This Hunger Lunch even made it onto the local Raleigh, NC news program at ABC 11!

The proceeds will be donated directly to Partners In Health, a non-profit organization dedicated to providing modern medical care in Haiti. To check out their website, visit http://www.standwithhaiti.org/haiti.

Keep up the great work!

We are excited to report that the New Year has brought six fresh, fabulous faces to Nourish International’s National Office! Get to know our Spring 2010 interns and read their bios below!

Allison Taylor: Allison Taylor, while originally from Wisconsin, has spent most of her life in the state of North Carolina. A senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, she is a Spanish and Political Science double major. Allison has traveled to Latin America and Spain multiple times. She has done humanitarian work close to home, working with refugees through World Relief, and abroad, working with the impoverished in Ecuador through Happy Feet.

Amanda Conklin: Amanda Conklin is the Chapter Coordinator Intern at Nourish. She is a sophomore at UNC-Chapel Hill and is majoring in International Studies. She is also involved with Student Government, Millennium Village Project, and Model United Nations on campus. After graduation, she would like to pursue a career with the Foreign Service sector of the State Department.

Emily Pearce: Emily is currently a freshman at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and is excited to participate in Nourish International as a PR intern. She graduated high school in her hometown of Long Beach, California with a particularly strong interest in exploring sustainability in business- inspired by her AP Environmental Science teacher. While in high school, she studied in Granada, Spain, which sparked her passion for international travel. She plans to major in business and minor in sustainability studies, and use these degrees to help teach rural communities in Spanish speaking countries how to be more prosperous while also being sustainable.

Mallory Smith: Mallory is a senior at North Carolina State University where she studies Spanish and International Relations. Throughout her college career, Mallory has spent time studying in Peru, Prague, and Seville. Last summer she completed an internship in Seville. There, she assisted the immigrant and refugee communities by helping them search for jobs and tutoring them in Spanish. Mallory joined Nourish in January 2010 as an intern.

Max Rose: Max is a junior political science major from Durham, and is the International Projects Coordinator for the spring. He returns this semester from six months in Uruguay, where he studied international relations and
volunteered in microfinance with “Un Techo Para mi Pais”, which works in impoverished neighborhoods throughout Latin America. Prior to the internship, Max worked for two years as a reporter and editor on the city desk at The Daily Tar Heel. He went to Honduras in summer 2008 as part of the Nourish partnership with FIPAH, an organization which works with hill-side farmers.

Sarah Monroe Solomon: Susan is a new intern on the Chapter Founders team. She is a junior Sociology major at UNC-Chapel Hill, with a focus in social entrepreneurship. She co-leads a team of students that will travel to Siguatepeque, Honduras this spring to build a home for a family in need and plans to study abroad in India over the summer. After graduation, Sarah hopes to attend law school to strengthen her global quest for human rights.