A Global Gateway: The battle of Waterloo

My internship placement at London Citizens has gotten off to an interesting start to say the least. I’ll lead off with the first day:

We went into the office in White Chapel expecting to get briefed on what supermarkets to go to; we were dead wrong. The Evening Standard wanted to run a story on stores on Oxford Street (the British equivalent of Route 17 in Paramus New Jersey) paying workers below the Living Wage. Our bosses delegated that work to us. My partner and I were assigned 5 stores to go to. My personal favorite was Nike Town, a 4 story store filled with every Nike product ever. Our story was that we were looking for jobs and wanted to know the starting wage before we got hired. I got offered a job at Nike Town, almost took it too. We were turned away at only 2 stores (which I can’t mention here apparently). All in all it was fun. The most “fun” came that night when we went to a public debate mayor Boris Johnson was at. One of our bosses asked us to wear t-shirts, hold signs and a banner and distribute London Citizens literature to people as they came in (hence the blog title, I felt like I was going off to battle "The Man"). We immediately got kicked-out because our literature was not pre-approved. To say the least, that wasn’t what any of us signed up for – at all – period. We were pretty angry we were put in that position. We had tickets though, so we got in anyway, just without the shirts or literature or signs. It was embarrassing, but it wasn’t our call. I guess when you’re an intern you do what you have to do to get through it. To add to all that, the literature we were handing out had nothing to do with the Living Wage campaign, which was what we were assigned to. We’ll see what happens there. No worries, it all gets better.

I’m a political science major at UConn, but I’m also interested in video editing and filming. I want to try and tie that into a career hopefully. I think I’m going to consider this placement experience for that branch of my future. I met with the communications director for the Living Wage Campaign. The meeting was very, very successful. Both the Comm. Director and I came away excited and confident with what our goal was for the next 3 months. 15 interviews and several promotional spots for the Living Wage campaign to go out on various outlets. The meeting lasted an hour and we got the blessing and input of my boss for the Living Wage campaign which was awesome. This evening, I will have the opportunity to present my proposal to the London Citizens Steering committee to see if it’s possible to implement. I’m optimistic that they’ll be receptive to it. This is what I wanted to do London Citizens for. They claim I’d be a part of real change, and I think I can this way. When I got back, my roommate and I went to SportsDirect, a kind of miniature Dicks Sporting Goods. I got myself a Chelsea jersey. I kind of wanted an Aston Villa kit (I like the FX Pro logo), but those I think are by Nike, so if I want that I’ll have to go to Nike Town again. This Chelsea jersey was very cheap though, so I think I’ll have money in the budge to either get the Aston Villa shirt or a long-sleeve Fulham shirt this weekend at the match.

Aston Villa

Chelsea (I have this one)

Fulham, the club I'm seeing this weekend)

Everything is coming to form right now and I’m really excited for the chance to jump in head first on the Living Wage Campaign. Hopefully it’ll be what everyone thought it was going to be. Here are some more photo's I've taken throughout the trip: