When I joined Bankers without Borders in 2009, our three-person team was focused on providing just one service: hands-on, experienced guidance to scope and manage impactful projects that would be carried out by our skilled volunteers. Four years later, we’ve grown tremendously. Today, the BwB team is present in every continent (except Antarctica) and our volunteer reserve corps has increased 50-fold!
Customized, client-focused projects are still at the core of our program and, as you can see from our open opportunities page, we're still going strong with this critical service offering. But we've also expanded our services and developed new engagement opportunities including an internship program, a fellowship program, crowdsourcing and a collection of what we call "blueprint projects" which include financial projections modeling and risk management assessments. My role in the BwB team is to design and implement these "standardized" offerings. To help demystify some of these new services, I'd like to take you through the insights and motivations that inspired our evolution. But instead of bullet points or paragraphs, I thought I’d go for something a little more fun. Hope you enjoy it!
At Bankers without Borders’ core is our innovative spirit rooted in a mission to connect talent, skills and passion with opportunities. Our comfort with experimentation builds our confidence in embracing failure and success equally as learning opportunities, and we're continuing to charge boldly into the future with our new crowdsourcing work. Watching our team grow and develop new tools for engagement is an ongoing adventure, so please stay tuned for more!
Samantha Haviser is the Program Officer for Bankers without Borders.