Carly Griffith – our new Intern for Health and Inequality, shares her thoughts on her first week at MutualGain.  

Monday 17^th July 2017 – First meeting with MutualGain.

The day started off with an early morning train down to Birmingham, where the meeting was set to take place at Moseley Exchange. I was nervous but excited to meet the MutualGain team and begin working with them.

Things got off to a bad start, as despite having memorised the route to the venue on google maps, I managed to come out of the maze that is Birmingham New Street station, at the wrong exit and got myself lost! As a result of this I got to the meeting 10 minutes late which I was quite annoyed at myself for as that was not the first impression that I had wanted to make.

When I arrived, I was introduced to Susan, Andrew, and Owen, I also met Tom my fellow intern. After the introductions, Susan gave an introductory talk about what we will be working on whilst interning at MutualGain, and a chance to ask questions about our roles and what was expected of us. Everyone was really friendly and I soon realised that Andrew and myself had a lot in common, being from the same local area, although we do support rival football teams!

We talked about how we can get people involved in community meetings and schemes to increase social capital and build citizenship. The analogy of a good date was used to describe how to get people involved in community engagement, the date must be attractive and be a good date with conversation flowing both ways to make people want to go on a second date, or take part in community engagement again.

We were given a questionnaire to fill out before lunch about social styles. The four social styles we could be were; Analytical, Driver, Amiable or Expressive. The result of my questionnaire was that I was an expressive-driver, meaning that I am a poor listener but I talk a lot and tell stories, I am opinionated and a good debater. All of this means that I am likely to take the lead in situations and like to control what is going on around me, which doing a law degree is a great set of skills to have. However, it also highlights the areas where I have to try harder in order to work best with people, such as becoming a better listener, and to realise that I can’t control everything around me, all the time.

After a very tasty lunch, Tom and I were tasked with creating a biteable; a short-animated video, which neither of us had done before. We were given 20 minutes to do this and I would say that despite it being one of the cringy-est things I have ever created that it was successful and that we worked well together and both learnt a new skill on our first day!

Overall, I really enjoyed my first day at MutualGain and look forward to working with Susan, Andrew, Owen and Tom in the future.

You can find out more about Carly’s work with us by following her on twitter: www.twitter.com/MG_CarlyG