Summer at Samasource

We are well into our Summer Associate program at Samasource.  We have four full-time Associates spread across Haiti, India, and Kenya and five more Associates in our San Francisco office – Samasource’s largest Associate class ever.  Our roles vary as much as our experience.  We tackle marketing, fundraising, quality, client management, and engineering, and plenty of other side projects.

As a Senior Associate in San Francisco, my main goal is to evaluate and revamp the training process for our workers located all over the world.  The potential scale of the project (codename: SamaSchool) can be intimidating; I’ve found it can be sometimes an extremely complex and other times a simple problem.  Large companies can spend many years and millions of dollars to develop an effective training system, and yet perhaps every small business which has ever employed more than a few people has had to decide how to train its new employees.  More than once I’ve agonized over making a key decision, only to learn later that much larger, more resourced companies have made similar decisions in their early days with just as limited information.

An important consideration in designing our training is our audience.  Some Samasource workers have never previously typed on a computer, used the internet, or heard of a spreadsheet.  And yet we sometimes train these same people within a few weeks to be able to process volumes of complex, sensitive digitized information.  Perhaps because our primary objective is to help ease poverty in the communities where our workers live, a misconception is that a non-profit organization like ours would provide only simple kinds of work.  However, Samasource’s ultimate goal is to use for-profit business principles to deliver valuable services to our clients even when that client might not necessarily understand our mission.  Our workers’ jobs have real value in the marketplace and the work can be far from easy.  Muhammad Yunus describes this vision of a social business:

Perhaps for some consumers, the social benefits created by the social business will be an additional reason to buy from it — just as some consumers today prefer to patronize companies with a reputation for being worker-friendly, environmentally conscious, or socially responsible. But for the most part, social businesses will compete with PMBs [profit-maximizing businesses] on the same terms as we see in traditional capitalist competition — and may the best company win.

When a leading technology company asks Samasource to process millions of pieces of information in order to ensure the continued relevance of its most important product, would it let us deliver a lower level of quality as a kind of “social donation”?  As a former liberal arts major I feel it would be hugely generous if they did, but as a current MBA student, I also know this is just as hugely unlikely to happen.  Samasource is striving to win and be what Yunus refers to as “the best company,” so we can continue to bring more jobs to our workers who need them.

Finally, as I mentioned in the first paragraph, each Summer Associate has many projects, and I have the fun responsibility of coordinating several short Samasource documentaries. We have two different film production companies coming into the office to meet our staff and also visit the field.  The early footage looks extremely promising, and we plan to share the finished videos soon.  Next in our blog:  more updates from our Associates!

Interviewing Chelsea at nearby Dolores Park

Interviewing Leila in the office