Week eight has finally arrived, and with it – Summit! One of the expert-led workshops I helped support took place on Tuesday, and the youth-led workshops I directly organized are both on Wednesday, as is the other expert-led workshop to which I contributed. Unfortunately, the Wednesday expert-led workshop (on NFTs) overlaps with my second youth-led workshop, so I will not be able to see the final product of the NFT workshop.

The Summit was a huge success. The overall theme of the Summit was “We’re Not Waiting, Change is Now,” and the speakers, workshops, and events were all designed to resonate around that sentiment. On day 1, events included lounges for girls of different regions – strategically scheduled to be accessible for people of all time zones. The Summit was historically held in-person, in either D.C. (the UNF HQ) or New York (the UN’s American home), but during spring 2020, the pandemic pushed the Girl Up team to make Summit a virtual event. The 2020 Summit had the highest attendance of any Summit, so the team decided to run the same model in 2021. When I first started speaking with the Girl Up team about the possibility of my interning this summer, they hadn’t yet decided if this year’s workshop would be in-person, online, or hybrid, although they were leaning towards hybrid, and ultimately decided to go fully online. One benefit of the remote-friendly world we all embraced is how much more accessible it is for people from different places. The platform the Summit ran on, HopIn, had a lot of cool features to help emulate an in-person conference, including chat rooms and lounges to mimic what life could be like in an in-person Summit. One feature I especially liked was the trivia section – at any point in the Summit, attendees could click into trivia.

My two Workshops went spectacularly. The Club workshop was flawless, although ran slightly over the allotted time. After the Monday rehearsal, the GBV team pulled the workshop together amazingly. One of the girls was limited by her bandwidth, so the other two were prepared to cover her portion of the workshop and ended up executing it beautifully.

Me and the GBV team at the end of their Workshop! During the Q&A - right before we moved on to the Inspire Sessions.

Another task I contributed to as an intern on the Summit team was monitoring the chat – three people were assigned to different workshops and events to ensure the chat remained a safe and brave space for attendees, and to – if necessary – remove people who are deviating from the mission of the Summit.

Following Summit, I now need to make some progress on my passion project – assessing the current monitoring and evaluation practices of Girl Up. I am evaluating five M&E documents that are currently being utilized, attempting to assess where there are overlaps and where data can be streamlined into more impactful methods of measurement!