Looking back at my time working with ACH | Yasmeen's story
After 5 years of working for ACH, our Project Officer Yasmeen, is sadly moving on to a new job.
To mark her departure, we asked Yasmeen to reflect on her time working of ACH, to take a look back at all she's achieved and commemorate the mark she's had on our organisation.
From leading projects like the system-changing SEESI project, to developing equitable climate action on the Community Climate Action Project, Yasmeen's commitment to social enterprise and making a difference for refugee and migrant communities has been remarkable.
Keep reading to find out more...
Our Company Secretary had asked me in my first few month at ACH a huge question. He’d pulled me aside and asked me “what do you want your legacy to be?”
During the course of my five-year employment at ACH, I've returned to this question a few times, and I believe I've uncovered at least a part of the answer. To take you back to the beginning, my time at ACH started by complete chance. As part of a Santander scheme with my University, I jumped at the opportunity to put my English degree to use by working as part of the Marketing and Communications Team. In retrospect, I discovered that I wasn't their first choice for employment. Richard Thickpenny, our Chief Innovation Officer, intervened, overruled their choice, and made the decision to hire me.
Since then, ACH and I have changed and grown in many ways. I’d moved through the organisation from a Marketing Intern with a 3-month expiration date, to working with some amazing and brilliant people as a Project Officer. I’ve had the opportunity to work on projects that have taken me around the world, and I've met people who have genuinely motivated me to strive for more.
Some stand out moments that live rent-free in my mind are my stint as Marketing Manager for two weeks, my trip to Berbera beach with all the staff and students as part of a training project to upskill civil servants in Somalia, sitting around the Airbnb with my SEESI and ARIVE colleagues after a hard day of meetings and networking and just laughing and watching a movie, and all the fun moments we’ve shared on a random Friday afternoon just reflecting on our week and helping each other to stay sane.
I can’t quite imagine a life before or even after ACH, but I do know that I credit everyone at ACH for helping me become the person I am today.
For anyone wanting to join, or even thinking about applying my advice is to just go for it. The people that work at ACH stand as a testament to the ethos of the organisation. They are the ones that have made working at ACH the best experience of my adult life thus far, and without them ACH would be nothing.
So, when it comes to answering the question “what do you want your legacy to be?” I can say that, in part, I would like it to be a legacy filled with kindness, compassion and fun, a lot like the staff members at ACH, both past and present.