Job description assignment

                                                Business Development Intern               Daniel Moll

Prior to this summer, my adult working experience consisted of a previous summer job as a camp counselor, in addition to a year-long stint as a preschool teacher. Fortunately, I earned a spot in a professional fellowship that connected me to an organization called One Table, a non-profit that was making a real impact within Jewish communities nation-wide.

This “Shabbat Startup” focuses primarily on creating meaningful experiences for Jewish young adults to help them build a stronger connection to their Jewish community. They accomplish this by supporting community-hosted Friday-night dinners. They use an event platform where people can create and invite people to their Shabbat dinners. They also provide resources in the form of “nourishment,” food credit given to dinner hosts based on the amount of people that sign up for their dinner in addition to individual help from experienced, local “coaches” that can help them work through any roadblocks they come across.

My job fell under the umbrella of the San Francisco/Bay Area regional hub; working directly alongside my “mentor,” the senior regional manager for West Coast operations. Day-to-day we worked out of a co-working space in San Francisco. My daily work varied tremendously within the scope of “Business Development;” however, my main responsibilities fit into 3 roles:

·       Community Representative 

·       Event Planner

·       General Researcher and Data-Collector

Community Representative

As a member of the One Table team I some of my responsibilities included meeting and speaking with people outside of the organization. For example:

• I screened new Shabbat hosts that had applied through the One Table platform using follow up emails and quick phone conversations. It took me a bit to train my “phone –voice” so that I would sound confident and friendly over the phone.
• This allowed me to get to know new hosts and answer any questions they might have had about our organization.
• I attended meetings with local Shabbat coaches.
• This gave us a chance to get feedback from them. My organization relied a great deal on its coaches, so making sure they received proper support was very important.
• I also served as a side-kick of sorts, attending meetings with my mentor; taking notes and absorbing important information like a sponge.

Event Planner

In addition to the Shabbat dinners we help support, we host unique cooking workshops and larger dinners that hopefully serve to further the mission of One Table. Over the course of my internship I had large hand in planning, coordinating and several of these events. Some tasks that would fall under this category included:

• I found appropriate spaces for these events to occur. I also created detailed documents for use in future venue searches.
• I also talked with venue owners and worked out smaller details and considerations specific to the event.
• I acted as an organizer and helper during these events, going to wherever help was need; cooking, check-in, clean-up etc.
• I attended regular post-event sessions with a small group of the organizers to discuss challenges and lessons from the nights before.

An example of a larger event that I helped to execute in this role was “Shabbat Salaam,” an interfaith Shabbat that used food as a vehicle for promoting friendship and understanding between the Jewish and Muslim communities. This event took a great deal of effort to organize and ended past twelve at night; however, it was it was a unique experience and I was glad to be a part of it.

One Table was a series of cooking workshops, where people get to learn some skills and recipes in a small group setting. I had the chance to help host and run an event of this of this type called “Simple Summer Desserts.” We invited a local Shabbat coach to come and teach a group of people how to make a couple interesting desserts using fruits available in the summer.

Researcher

Another part of my job was to look for information that would be of use to my mentor and company. Included within this role was data imputation and presentation. During my time at One Table, we were preparing to launch a new “hub” in Los Angeles, so much of my research was connected to this. Tasks I completed under this category included:

• I looked through city and county census data to find relevant information about the population in different neighborhoods.
• The most important piece of data was the distribution of young people (aged 19-35) within an area, but I also collected data on marital status and other factors to create a more complete neighborhood profile.
• For the Los Angeles launch, I used an interactive map of LA county to methodically explore over 100 individual neighborhoods.
• I also gathered information connected to businesses and organizations in Los Angeles.
• I searched for non-profits that were successfully engaging young Jewish people
• I looked for local grocery stores that could provide food for local Shabbat hosts.
• I tried to find people; chefs, influencers etc. that were doing cool things in Los Angeles-- the Jewish context was less relevant for tasks like this.
• I assisted my mentor in researching any other requests.
• I looked for Airbnb’s for a trip to Los Angeles.
• I found photos that could represent Los Angeles on our company page.
• I created a document of interesting recipes for a weekly regional newsletter.

Readability stats:

Flesch reading ease 53.1

Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level 10.2

Passive sentences 2.4% (I don't think it recognized "One Table" as a proper noun)