Success Stories
Coro Pittsburgh will profile some of its most accomplished and successful recent alumni in a series of web posts, “Coro Success Stories.” This month we meet Mykia Long, and Dave Voll.
Mykia Long and Dave Voll were both part of the 2009-2010 class of Fellows in Public Affairs in Pittsburgh. Last summer, they had the unique opportunity to work together again in Liberia. Dave and Mykia were two of four students selected from Carnegie Mellon University to work for the Ministry of Planning and Economic Affairs in Liberia.
"I have a goal of living and working on every continent," explained Dave, "It's a big objective to complete that list, and this was an opportunity to accomplish one of those things on the list, while having the ability to have a large scale impact in a place that needed large scale impacts. It was a pretty amazing opportunity."
"It was a pleasant surprise that Dave and I were working as partners again at another government related project," recalls Mykia. "We definitely had an advantage, since we knew each other, and had already been through the process of working in a group together."
Mykia and Dave were tasked with two projects during their time in Liberia, the first being to narrow down project proposals for PSID, the Public Sector Investment Plan. Essentially this meant determining which projects in the country should be funded with borrowed capital.
"We had impact on day one," says Dave. "Our supervisor wanted daily memos from us, so Mykia and I adopted a Coro-style memo template, and by the end of our first week, the format was adopted by the entire ministry. They loved the memos, and we were easily able to keep everyone informed of what we were doing."
"Essentially we did everything we'd had to do as Coro Fellows," Mykia explained. "We were outsiders coming in, and had to understand and navigate a new organization."
"Some of the best preparation Mykia and I had were OARR's (an organizational meeting tool), setting objectives and roles, while understanding what key deliverables we needed to move forward and make meetings really effective," said Dave.
Through scheduling meetings with Liberia's various ministers to evaluate their capacity for proposals, Mykia and Dave learned huge lessons in diplomacy, evaluation and organizational change, and quickly developed their understanding of a foreign country.
"We really tried to focus on 4-WH (Who, What, Where, When, How) questions to reach our objectives, which helped us make the best use of our time while we were with these individuals, and prove that we were competent," said Dave. "A lot of the strategizing that was taught to us in Coro; how to engage placement partners, or how to shift a placement from an internal-external relationship to more of a collaborative endeavor. We were all there to solve a problem. Gaining trust was huge."
After success with their first project, the fiscal year was coming to a close, and the Ministry was setting budgets. Dave and Mykia were called upon to develop a tool to decide how the projected budget would be implemented in the upcoming fiscal year.
"The process of Coro placements was really synonomous with our work there," recalls Mykia. "We had to quickly develop a timeline, deliverables, and an executive report, all while managing expectations. We ended up facilitating a lot of meetings that we weren't expecting to facilitate, but it came very easily to us. It was great to be able to apply both our Coro and Heinz experiences together."
Both Mykia and Dave are finishing up their Masters degrees through Heinz College at Carnegie Mellon University. They are interested in international consulting and working in education policy. We can't wait to see what Dave and Mykia will take on next!
Success Stories:
Since its opening in 1999, Coro Pittsburgh has been impacting the region by transforming people into skilled leaders. Our success stories illustrate how
Archives:
May, 2011 - Matthew Mehalik, FPPA
June, 2011 - Allyce Pinchback, LIL
July, 2011 - JoAnn R. Forrester, RPO
August, 2011 - Stephen Zumbrun, LIL
September, 2011 - Lynne and Joe Ventress, FPPA and Public Allies
October, 2011 - Abe Taleb and Alex Lackner, LIL and FPPA
November, 2011 - Raymar Hampshire, FPPA
