Alice joined Quiet Connections to connect with ‘quieteers’ attending our weekly Meet Ups and uncover our social impact. Alice used a combination of surveys, video calls and messaging to gently draw out experiences from our introverted, sensitive and shy quieteers, then created beautiful visual stories for social media. 

Alice’s storytelling gave people who were thinking about joining our Meet Ups a sense of what it was like to be a part of Quiet Connections and the reassurance and social proof they needed to take that first brave step to come along. The quieteers who spoke with Alice enjoyed connecting with her and it gave them a new way to contribute to the community. The stories were also used to demonstrate our impact to the National Lottery Community Fund. 

For us, we knew it was important to collect and share stories in this way and had wanted to do this for a long time, but other tasks were more urgent. So, it was exciting to see this project come to life with a Storytelling Intern to focus on this alone. What’s more, our weekly team explorations with Alice also left us feeling re-energised and more deeply connected to our work and community, too. 

Being a part of a social enterprise like ours as an intern, you become a vital part of the team, immersing yourself in the organisation’s purpose and explorations with us. Through bringing fresh perspectives and questions, compassion and curiosity, and the courage to meaningfully shape and contribute to a project that we’d otherwise be under-resourced to complete, you have the potential to make waves of positive change. 

Lena came to us at a time when Wild Wonder and Wisdom was on SSE’s Trade-up learning programme, and I was in the process of taking on an employee to focus on our admin and HR.  This meant that Lena and I were able to work out how best to work together and what her strengths were so we could both make the best of the internship opportunity.  We had to figure out an effective way to communicate with each other and keep all our work in a central place.  Lena was an expert at this due to the nature of her PhD and having to work on numerous projects already at Exeter University. She arranged a shared OneDrive and this was very effective.  She also shared her knowledge of Slack which WWW has since chosen to use for all of our communications.

Lena was very organised, an active listener and quickly understood what WWW was all about and aligned with our values straight away.  I personally loved the opportunity to talk to someone about my aspirations for WWW on an academic level and we were able to use our time effectively so we could discuss both my PhD dream about investigating Momentary Happiness in young people as a positive mental health strategy and plan our upcoming 'Wild and Wonderful Periods event on 25^th March. I was also able to share my journey of becoming a social enterprise and CIC with Lena as she aspires to do this in the future too.  It was such a positive experience, and I would love to have the opportunity to both work with Lena again, and to host another intern.  It was wonderful ��