Internship at Meta-Culture, Week 1

Hello All,

My name is Mihika and I am interning at Meta-Culture, Bangalore. I recently finished my undergrad at McGill University in Montreal, Canada with a double major in History and Political Science. I knew I wanted to come back to India but wasn't very sure how I could use my degree here or how and where I could fit it. Through word of mouth, I heard about Meta-Culture, a conflict resolution organization, and of course Googled it, applied for an internship and was lucky enough to be funded by Choice.

Meta-Culture consists of a non- profit called Meta-Culture Dialogics(MCD) and for-profit called Meta-Culture Consulting (MCC). Dialogics works on community related projects like facilitating dialogue and intervening between conflicting parties whether they be families or communities and through education and outreach programs. Consulting on the other hand, uses dispute management, communication skill building and mediation to create productive working environments within other organizations. (For more info check out www.meta-culture.org and www.meta-culture.in)

I arrived on Wednesday and walked into a staff meeting at 9am which I soon discovered is how the day usually begins at Meta-Culture. The staff here consists of people of different backgrounds, nationalities and ethnicities who work as an extremely cohesive team and seem to constantly be on their toes. This was immediately refreshing compared to previous internships and offices i have been in and I was excited to start work and feel like part of the team.

I started my internship with some basic admin work for MCC, like sending out emails and familiarizing my self with the setup here. On Friday, I was allowed to sit in on a very important meeting discussing and formalizing the governing policy of MCD. This was really exciting because it was like being part of the writing of the 'constitution' of Dialogics. On Saturday, the entire office split up and went putting up posters for an event that Dialogics is hosting called "Bengaluru Speaks"- a forum where MCD will be facilitating dialogue between citizens and discussing issues pertaining to the city of Bangalore.

This week onwards I will be working with the Consulting division on an Open Enrollment seminar called "Managing Workplace Conflict". More on this later.

Cheers!