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We help nonprofit organizations maximize their marketing and communications efforts to achieve genuine social impact.

Kiah Thomas is a recent high school graduate preparing to transition to college in the fall.  These are her thoughts on Media Day, an annual even organized by Junior Achievement of New York (JANY) to show middle schoolers the various types of careers they can have in the media.

I admit it, I didn’t like middle school. The kids were always so quick to judge, and once they made a judgment about something, or somebody, they’d stick to it (even me). That’s why I was a little hesitant when my mom told me about presenting in front of middle school kids for Media Day.  I could see their unenthused expressions, slumped in deteriorating auditorium chairs wondering why they were being put through this. I could see some yawning, talking to their friends next to them. Some on their phones or sidekicks, which has become a teen’s bff. When asked questions, no one’s hands would go up. I remembered my own middle school days, going to assemblies and being bored out of my mind as people I didn’t know talked about stuff I didn’t care about. I soon felt guilty, because I was now the person they didn’t know, informing them on things they probably wouldn’t care about. 

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This entry marks the first blog post of our summer intern, Shanika Gunaratna.  Shanika is currently an undergraduate student at Northwestern University, and she will be making waves with us through the end of the summer.

Recently, TIME Magazine published a special issue tackling America’s obesity epidemic. On the cover of this issue, entitled “Our Super-Sized Kids,” was an obese child curiously eyeing a double-scoop ice cream cone – one scoop sugary pink, the other an artificially bright orange. The magazine was stocked so full of information on national overeating that it was double its regular size. It is with this renewed awareness of American obesity that I attended a Doctors Without Borders/Medecins Sans Frontieres (MSF) lecture on a very different topic: the international crisis of malnutrition.

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