Vittana Fellows Revealed

You’ve read their posts on the Vittana blog and seen their videos on our YouTube channel, but you may still be wondering—who exactly are these mysterious Vittana Fellows?

The Fellows program started fairly informally as a way for friends of the Vittana community to help out during their personal travels to our partner countries. Today these “super-volunteers” play a vital role in the Vittana process by performing duties such as:

Adam Lenhardt worked with our partner MFI Fundacion Paraguaya.

• Enhancing the connection between lenders and students with materials such as blog posts, student updates, and videos (Like these ones here and here!)

• Reiterating Vittana’s mission and policies to our partners and answering any lingering questions about them.

• Addressing specific barriers in the loan process and working to improve the efficiency and frequency of loans.

Sounds easy, right? If the Fellow’s tasks seem simple, add in language and cultural barriers, the complicated interworking of an MFI, and the different objectives of bank officials, loan officers, students, and everyone else involved, and a Fellow’s job suddenly seems overwhelming. Nevertheless, our Fellows are known to go above and beyond their outlined tasks to improve our partnerships. In the past they have worked on everything from preparing material for our partners’ websites to training loan officers on what to look for in a potential Vittana student. Here at Vittana, we call our Fellows “scrappy” for their ability to get things done with little assistance, resources, or prior experience.

Our four former Fellows—Katie Gruver, Nayna Gupta, Adam Lenhardt, and Jordan Webster—come from backgrounds as varied as the challenges they faced abroad. Collectively, their interests include education, finance, music, law, development, and much more. Most of them had little formal experience in microfinance prior to setting off for their destinations, but they were all inspired by the possibilities it presented and were eager to learn more.

Nayna Gupta got a chance to explore Peru during her time as a Fellow.

There is clearly no set recipe of experiences that qualify someone to be a Vittana Fellow, but there are definitely certain qualities that all our Fellows share. According to Nick, Vittana’s International Partnerships Manager, our Fellows are all “smart, motivated, independent thinkers who approach challenging problems with a solutions mindset.” They all have a high degree of resourcefulness, flexibility, and persistence, and a remarkable ability to self-initiate. Most important though, is their innate desire to make a difference and their strong commitment to furthering the Vittana mission.

After all, it takes some pretty strong motivation for someone to postpone a comfortable life in the U.S. and work unpaid for a few months in a foreign country. Our Fellows are driven to do this by a variety of factors. As Jordan puts it, it’s the desire to “travel with a purpose.” Others see it as an opportunity to improve their language skills or kick-start a new career in microfinance.  But all of our former Fellows speak of the sense of accomplishment they feel knowing that more students are going to college because of the work they have done.

Whatever their motivations, the Vittana Fellows are essential to the success of our partnerships and overall mission. To all our Fellows—past, present, and future—we applaud you and thank you for your tremendous contribution and commitment to the Vittana cause.

Think you might have a future as a Vittana Fellow? You can learn more about the program on our website at http://www.vittana.org/getinvolved. While our ability to take on Fellows is largely dependent on the needs of our partners, Vittana is always open to applications from qualified, driven college graduates who want to spend 2-4 months volunteering with a a Vittna partner MFI.  We currently have a specific need for applicants with Vietnamese or Mongolian language proficiency.

Tagged as: education, fellows, on the ground, partners, students, volunteer, whatwedo