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Hi! Kirk Richardson here from the
Stevenson Center for Applied Community
and Economic Development. I am a Peace Corps Fellow in the Politics and
Government Department and I'm currently
completing my internship at a CDFI in
beautiful Missoula, Montana.
And if you're like I was before starting
this internship and think "CDFI" is just
another product of the pervasive acronym-philia
in the development world, you're
right! But it also stands for "certified
development financial institution." CDFIs
can be a community bank, nonprofit
organization, or something similar, but
what they all have in common is a
dedication to providing non-predatory
loans to low-income people. One of the
more common forms of this is small
business lending which just so happens
to be our core product. With our small
business loans we tend to lend
exclusively to people who are unable to
get a traditional bank loan and wouldn't
otherwise be able to pursue their
entrepreneurial dream of independence
from "the man." Within my organization,
which serves both Montana and Idaho, I do
a lot of different odd jobs from
generating analytic reports within our
CRM to promoting new products by
traveling to communities across the two
states and meeting with developers and
local residents face-to-face. So even
though I'm working in the finance
industry, I'm doing things that aren't so
different from what I've done in the
past. And I've bounced around quite a bit,
and I've learned that I'm simply most
comfortable being a jack-of-all-trades
and I'm finally accepting that and ready
to come out as a generalist in an age of
hyper-specialization. And considering my
background, it is surprising it took so
long. After graduating from university
with an English degree, I worked on
community development projects in the
Peace Corps for two years. I went to
Georgia; not the state, but the country. Or
sometimes I
say, "the former Soviet Republic of
Georgia," but people sometimes think that
I'm just trying to be fancy, like saying,
"the Providence of Rhode Island," so now I
mostly just say, "a small country right
below Russia on the Black Sea." And that
usually elicits enough intrigue to ask
the question, "which country?" And then I
can just say, "Georgia."
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Which, by the way, bears very little resemblance to the US state.
Needless to say, I had the "authentic Peace Corps experience"
and I loved it all things considered. I
didn't like not having heat and a non-insulated
cement Soviet style block
apartment in winter or getting a couple
gastrointestinal parasites from
contaminated water, but those were really
minor things in the grand scheme of the
whole experience, which really was
transformative.
Without a doubt,
Peace Corps' best slogan
remains, "the toughest job you'll ever
love".... or, "the worst vacation you'll ever have."
The Peace Corps was also where I
learned that I like playing the
chameleon; code-switching between friends
of different nationalities or between
host country politicians and the
villager whose wine I was helping to
make. It was fun seeing multiple
perspectives and understanding the
patterns of thought between diverse
groups of people has been one of the
most useful skills I've accrued through
experience. So if you're like me and you
are fretting over your programmatic
choices or where you might end up for an
internship or for Peace Corps, my advice
is to adopt the meta-perspective and
believe that if you have the right
mindset, you will learn useful skills and
have a profound experience no matter
what, and that the fellowship or Peace
Corps service, whichever you're
contemplating, will define your life to
an extent, but it doesn't have to define
your career if you decide you don't want
it to. The decision will ultimately still
be yours.
You'll just be
better informed to make those decisions and
that sense of being informed and a
feeling of self-efficacy are definitely
two things that have grown during my
experience at Illinois State. On the one
hand, the applied nature of the program
is immensely refreshing. Trust me, I love
going down the rabbit hole and I like to
explore big questions. After all, I
graduated with a degree in English
during the recession. I sacrificed for
the ramen noodle ideals of the dorm room
and I don't think those ideas are
trivial. I don't want to dismiss them. But,
for people who want to be effective in
the world, who want their ideas to mean
something, there has to be a connection
to the actual events and forces that
shape our built environment, and it can
be very hard to see-- to really see-- those
forces when we aren't directly
interacting with them. And academia is
something of a shelter from them, which
can be good for providing a needed
third-party perspective and informing
practitioners and changing the way
things are done and directing our
cultural ethos on the grand scale.
However, that sort of change comes when
tempered with and informed by how things
work in the day to day among people and
organizations chasing narrow goals, or
doing really good but being slowed by
good-intentioned regulations, or a lack
of money, or inter-organizational
competition, or whatever. It's all gray
and it only gets grayer the farther one
gets from self-contained arguments. A lot
of things cannot be accounted for in
statistical modeling, so just like
balancing quantitative work with
qualitative data, I like to supplement my
education with practice and that is one
of the benefits of the Stevenson Center
program. We went to undergrad, then worked
in the
world for a bit, came back to reconsider
some theory interspersed with more
technical skills, and now we're off tampering
with the world again-- tinkering
with our own personal reality constructs.
I think this is the best way to engage
with the world and that is why I
appreciate the Stevenson Center and its
applied focus. So to some, worry a bit
less when projecting your future but
work like a demon to affect change that
matters to you. Value experiential
learning as much as formal learning and
court discomfort as the cost for
expanding your ability to understand the
world. Anyway, I hope that helps. This is
Kirk Richardson, signing out.
