The primary problem that the YVC seeks to address is two-fold and simultaneous: historic alienation of youth from decision-making and amplifying the voices of historically marginalized Indigenous and Ancestral peoples. We aim to resolve them by building a bridge between youth and Roots & Routes partners, where we learn from and strengthen one another.
Roots & Routes Intercultural Collaborations focuses on facilitating the sharing of knowledge and compassion between diverse cultures while aiming to responsibly steward a flourishing living world. Our group, the Youth Visionary Collective, serves global youth who serve as 11-week seasonal interns for Roots & Routes IC. Our R&S project, the installment and use of Asana, has allowed the YVC to strengthen the group's communication, improve the organization, and allowed for much easier transitions. This project, just like the YVC, is led and managed by the youth. Not only are the interns at the YVC self-organized, but they are self-determined. One of the groups at the YVC is titled the “Youth Visionary Collective Advisory Board, Roots & Routes IC”, which works to advise our executive director personally. The youth of the YVC are directly involved in the use and transition to Asana. In addition, the youth gain experience with project management software that is utilized by many nonprofits. It is a true win-win!
Our R&S grant allowed us to maintain our Asana account for 2024, and it helped the YVC enormously. With Asana, we were able to link relevant resources under multiple projects and teams, which helped us as we transitioned between tasks and welcomed new interns. Asana also provided helpful visual representation of workload and timelines, while is sorely needed in digital workspaces like ours. Our applications of Asana were particularly rewarding, as this year our interns worked to market and fundraise for the release of Roots & Routes IC’s documentary, Together for Water, co-produced with our community partners in Ecuador. This included a YVC-run virtual kickoff event and background support for two in-person events in Ecuador, with combined hundreds of attendees.
We learned that we need to remove former interns from our Asana as soon as possible, so that we don’t get charged more for exceeding the limit. We also learned that unless we exclusively use Asana for communications, we can turn it into more of a hindrance than a help. At one point while contending with many tight deadlines in our winter season, we felt overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information spread across different platforms. More importantly, it made it hard to highlight which tasks needed feedback from our supervisor. To solve this problem, we had to discuss how much information was helpful or just overwhelming, and we made an effort to make our communications more concise.
Overall, we would need to be more rigorous in using Asana. We would be more diligent in removing and adding interns to our Asana as needed and in giving them a more in-depth orientation when they join the YVC. All interns and their projects should be moved to Asana as soon as possible. We would also consider dedicating a channel of communication on Asana to just summarizing important updates for our supervisor and steering team. One of our goals was to transition fully from emails to Asana, which we have not managed yet, but hope we get the chance to!
My favorite part of using Asana was the visual representation of tasks and their progress. When there aren’t the traditional cues of in-person workplaces, it can be easy for to-do lists to get disorganized. The charts and icons of Asana are clear and satisfying, which really helps you move through tasks and feel accomplished, which is very motivating.
Managing Asana membership is essential as the cost of your subscription can go up quickly! You can ask a departing team member to remove themselves from the organization, or you can have an admin deprovision them. Make sure that you are removing a person’s membership from your organization and not just their membership on a particular project or team.
