How long have you been working at New Tactics?

I started working at New Tactics in January 2005.

What prompted you to volunteer your time and skills?

I had just graduated college and was offered a two year job teaching Spanish at Macalester College, which gave me the opportunity to invest some of my time in other activities related to my career interests in the Twin Cities. I always wanted a career in the non-profit/multilateral world and I knew that I had to gain more exposure and experience before applying to graduate school. This is how I landed at CVT, where I found out about the New Tactics in Human Rights Project.

I was introduced to the project and to all they had done in Latin America since the Regional Training Workshop. I was offered a great opportunity and challenge, which was to actualize and edit all the material on the web page and to edit the Latin American Regional Training Workshop Report.

What specific resources do you translate? Have you done any other work with the project?

I edited and revised the translation of all the online material of the webpage, the monthly e-newsletter along with sending and responding to emails from activists in Latin America. I also made phone calls, created new webpages, and translated more material for the webpage. Last, but not least, I edited the Latin American Regional Traning Workshop Report which took several months of work.

What resources were available in Spanish before you began working for the project?

The webpage wasn’t up to date vs. the English webpage. Also, most of the material in Spanish seemed like a literal translation that didn’t convey the original meaning of those resources available in English, which means that I had to edit a lot of what was already available. Editing is always harder than translating.

What have been some of the highlights of your work at New Tactics?

It was very interesting to translate the correspondence between New Tactics and Latin American activists. By doing this I learned a lot about the challenges that small NGO’s with precarious funding face in Latin America and how important transnational cooperation is in a context of global failure of welfare systems. The transnational vocation of organizations like New Tactics was inspiring to me and I hope to dedicate my career to creating more ways of connecting civil society and NGO’s from all corners of the globe. It was great to see how activists from East Europe or Africa where inspired by those in Latin America, and vice versa, and how the experience of an organization from a different region and culture could enrich and contribute to the work of other organizations.

Any big challenges?

The biggest challenge I faced at New Tactics was editing the Latin American Regional Training Workshop Report. I had an original document of more than 40 pages which had to be shortened and polished. I had to go back to notes and files from the workshop, insert and crop pictures, design the layout and work closely with Kate Kelsch to make sure that everything was accurate. It was very challenging because I wasn’t at the workshop and sometimes I didn’t successfully convey the meaning of a specific session or panel on the report, so I was lucky to have Kate helping me throughout the process.

I also had to learn quickly how to deal with basic HTML programming for the New Tactics website. The first time I ever tried to update the website, I ended up deleting it entirely. Luckily, there was a backup of the files in some server, but I was really scared when I had to confess what I had done.

What’s next for you?

I will be attending the MA program at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS) in Washington D.C. where I will be studying International Economics and Latin American Studies in order to have a career in the multilateral world, and hopefully, contributing to improving people’s lives in Latin America.