A student's perspective on working at an NGO
This month, our intern Umemura-san will share her experience with us. She is currently attending college and doing a long-term internship at HOPE Japan (HOPE). She would like to share about the work that she has been involved in at an NGO from the perspective of a university student.
I first met with HOPE at an event called the "International Cooperation College" that is held once a year at JICA where students and other people can interact with organizations that carry out international aid and development work. Before I got involved with HOPE, I imagined that the main business of an NGO was to go abroad to deliver relief supplies and build schools. However, when I met HOPE at this event and learned that there are other ways to contribute to their work, I felt that I had to do something from Japan.
When I actually became involved in the work I realized that although there are many things that are directly related to project implementation abroad, my main tasks focused on creating awareness of the work that is being done in those developing countries. When you hear the word NGO, you tend to have this fancy image of flying around the world, but there is a lot of other work involved. While there are some staff members who do work abroad, through my internship I learned that the work being done in Japan is what enables the work that’s being done overseas.
One of the specific tasks I worked on was the Online HOPE Night event. HOPE holds a monthly event called HOPE Night featuring presentations about its projects overseas. This year, due to the coronavirus pandemic, we held the HOPE Night event online. As this was the first time to do the event online, we rehearsed repeatedly and refined our production by exchanging opinions, and in the end, we finally managed to hold this event after a lot of trial and error. I was very pleased that many people who participated in this event got interested in HOPE. At the same time, I strongly felt the importance of the work that is being done in Japan. I hope the online HOPE Night events will encourage more people to support HOPE’s cause.
In addition to such events, I mainly manage HOPE Japan's social media presence by creating illustrations for contributing to posts on Facebook, and I also translate articles from Japanese to English. Raising awareness of HOPE’s work was my main task. As a result, the number of friends who talk about HOPE and who support me continues increasing everyday which I can still see to this day.
Every day I realize that the work being done behind the scenes, and that usually goes unnoticed, is what eventually saves lives. There are ways to support HOPE locally. I want to bring water and joy from Japan to the world.
