STEP: Olivia Mathurin-Essandoh, Marketing Intern at Rosetta Arts

16 February 2018

STEP is a programme offering paid twelve-month jobs comprised of two internships in two different areas of the Creative Industries.

7 lucky east London applicants were chosen to take part in the programme, and are all currently working on their first internship placements. They will all be blogging about their experiences as the programme progresses - Click here to find out more about the STEP programme and check the blog section for more posts soon.

Here at Rosetta Arts, we are a small team that is ambitious to create an impact on our community through the arts. We decided to join the STEP internship scheme to recruit an intern. It was important to us that we employed someone local to the community and representative of the area. It was therefore wonderful that Olivia, who lives in Tower Hamlets, applied and was successful to the programme as she was is a really creative and dynamic young person who impressed us right from the first meeting.

We were conscious that as a small organisation we would be expecting a lot of any individual we took on into this role. We needed to recruit someone to take on our marketing functions and really dedicate some attention to this essential part of our operations and Olivia did this by applying her great talents for visual communications.

She quickly adapted to the complexities of our work communicating well with the whole team, our stakeholders and service users. She could recall her own lived experiences which is why it was so useful to have someone in post who represented a reflection of the community.

The role combines digital outreach with face to face outreach and she is confident to go out and about and meet community leaders to promote our work. She’s taken on these tasks with maturity and a great deal of initiative.

Olivia works with autonomy over what she does. Her approach appears to demonstrate that she is empowered in her work, actively achieving targets and getting things done even with areas of work she has never taken on before.

Through Olivia’s confident and ambitious attitude to the internship, she has demonstrated, and will continue to demonstrate, how a high quality and valuable internship can support a young person on their journey into their chosen career. By choosing to take part in STEP and taking full advantage of the training and resources offered as part of the programme, Olivia has actively developed herself.