Meet Shilpa Bhongir, a sophomore Econ major and our latest Campus Celebrity.
Tell me about your work within Oxypreneurship.
I work as a student leader of Oxypreneurship, leading the Action Team. Basically it’s planning for all Oxypreneurship events, from stuff as simple as a film screening or bringing a speaker to Innovate Oxy to organizing the TEDx Oxy event. There’s a whole team of us who cover event planning for Oxypreneurship.
I know you recently came back from a trip to Malaysia for Oxypreneurship.
Yes, the trip was part of Professor Khagram’s entrepreneurial leadership class. Ten Oxy students went to Malaysia to work on a side event of the Global Entrepreneurship Summit. The GES attracts over 3,000 people from around the world like professionals who work in the government or people who are entrepreneurs themselves. Basically a lot of change-makers. But our focus at the summit was Global Startup Youth. The youth side event brought in 500 students, 250 from Malaysia and 250 from 105 other countries.
What were you and other Oxy students specifically doing at the Global Startup Youth event?
Well the students spent three days building a working prototype of a mobile application that would address issues in four different areas: education, environment, health, and female empowerment. So in teams of ten, the students would choose a category and build their application. Our job wasn’t to be on a team but we acted as facilitators and organizers. Before the event, we researched the categories and came up with major topics for the teams to think about and get ideas. We actually had a chance to present our research to everyone at the youth program. I was also a general volunteer for the event; I helped people register, get their nametags, and I answered any questions. Basically just filling in all the gaps for that day. Later on we helped teams with their pitches and ideas. Other Oxypreneurship students helped speakers who worked at the event, or worked with the teams’ mentors.
Besides Oxypreneurship, how else are you involved on campus?
I also work as an assistant for the Young Initiative for Global Political Economy. It’s basically an initiative on campus to promote major events like the digital media wall in Johnson, the ongoing water theme, and to work to bring speakers to Oxy. So I’m just an assistant in event planning for them. One thing I’m helping with is the Young Fund application, which is for students applying to get grants for international research abroad.
Over the summer I also worked at an organization called the U.S. National Committee for UN Women. It’s an LA chapter and was just started about a year ago. It’s basically a volunteering advocacy group that’s meant to raise awareness for women’s issues in LA and globally, and to support any UN Women’s initiative. I specifically worked as an intern for the fund development team, doing fundraising for the chapter.
Oh, interesting. What can you tell me about the committee since it’s an off-campus organization?
The committee is entirely volunteer run and it’s made up of a bunch of smaller committees like for communication, fundraising, and there’s a committee for a major project called Safe Cities. It’s a UN Women project that gives an accreditation to a city for meeting safety requirements named by the women of that city. You start by working with women in communities to talk about what they would need to make their city feel safer. So in cities all over the world people from UN Women ask local women if they, say, need more street lamps for when they’re walking home at night and the committee forms a list of real, concrete things the women want to feel safer. When the city meets their list’s criteria, it’s awarded as a Safe City.
So the U.S. National Committee for UN Women is a part of UN Women?
Not exactly. We’re an advocacy group for UN Women, and we are working to join officially with UN Women. The difference is that our U.S. National Committee is trying to implement UN Women projects within American cities. So the U.S. National Committee is working on a Safe City project for LA. They want to take one neighborhood in LA and work with adolescent girls to figure out what they need to make it a safer city.
Your work with these three different organizations seems to fit into a similar trajectory.
Definitely. I’m interested in international development and social entrepreneurship. But specifically I’m interested in how, on a global level, we can use entrepreneurship as a means for development. So for example with UN Women I was interested in how women in developing countries use microfinance and how that helps develop their country’s economy. My hope really is that these initiatives in international development through means like entrepreneurship and economic empowerment will continue to grow in the future.
You can read Shilpa’s blog post about her trip to Malaysia here: http://oxypreneurship.squaresp…