CR Internship report!

Corporate Responsibility Internship Report
by Cecilia Arribere

In December 2003 I was selected to what it would become one of the most exiting experiences in my life so far, both from a personal and professional point of view! This was an internship in the CSR department of DHL Global Headquarters in Belgium. What it would originally last 9 months, it was then extended to 16 months.

I graduated from University in June 2003 and had a little experience in the private sector as well as my AIESEC experience, where I worked for three years. I had a Bachelor in International Commerce and was mostly motivated to work in the social field, so I decided to give it a try in the CSR arena as a way to integrate my business related studies and my personal motivation for social work. I knew it would be very difficult to find a traineeship in this field as there were pretty rare back then. Therefore I wrote to almost every organization working in CSR in Europe, especially because it was in this region where this subject was more developed and were I thought I would learn the most. The replies were none!

In the meantime I worked at a rather new NGO in Buenos Aires, which was just getting into the CSR field. There I made my first approach to the subject and got an overview of this incipient movement worldwide. In November 2003 I received an e-mail that DHL, an AIESEC global partner, was looking to recruit someone for their CSR department and immediately applied for it. Had a phone interviewed within a week with whom it would be one of my coolest bosses ever, and was selected to start in February 2004.

What to say now? It is really difficult to choose my words as there is so much I could tell. I guess the best is to separate what it was my professional experience from my personal experience.

From the professional point of view, it was as motivating as eye-opening as I experienced many things I hadn’t imagined on one hand, and on the other hand, didn’t come across a lot of things I now see I had idealized. Imagine my situation coming from a local NGO in Argentina to the global headquarters of a multinational company, with operations in 220 countries. The power, especially economic, involved in every decision that was made was such, that it also had a highly political price within the company. My department would directly report to the CEO’s office. Therefore the decisions to develop any CSR project were not necessarily based in the interest of making good for people, but in the interest of who had more power in the company.

I was selected for this internship along with a Swiss girl, Nicole. We both shared an awesome office and as she had also worked for AIESEC for several years and experienced the lack of resources to run an organization, we would share the delights of having our own personal computers, cell phones and direct phone lines for each one of us, IT experts who would fix any technical problems and unlimited prints!!!

Our work mostly involved a LOT of reading, studying and internet searching, assisting in the development of global CSR related policies for the company, helping with communication materials and, the most exiting part of the job, we were also trained to run internal CSR audits which took us to Holland, the UK several times, Lebanon and some other nice locations I don’t think I would have gone otherwise. We also met some really exiting and interesting people and we had one of the coolest working teams ever!

FULL Report:
http://www.aiesec.net/members/clubs/globallearningnetworks/lncorporateresponsibilityig/file-storage/file?file%5fid=49802037