Prompt #3 - What do I do at work?
July 18, 2013
This is a great one because many people know where
I work, but have no clue what I do. So to all you people, this one’s for you.
I currently work for the National
Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain Association. What do we do? Our mission
statement is this:
The National Fibromyalgia & Chronic Pain
Association unites patients, policy, medical and scientific communities to
transform lives through visionary support, advocacy, research and education to
develop affordable and accessible treatments and cures for fibromyalgia &
chronic pain illnesses.
And our vision statement is this:
The goal of the NFMCPA is to educate people
affected by fibromyalgia and/or chronic pain illnesses and the medical
community as well as the public, government agencies and scientists regarding
the importance of timely diagnosis and appropriate treatment of FM and
overlapping conditions in order to gain the most positive outcome for this
patient population.
Everything I do at work revolves around these two
statements, but I’ll go into more detail.
When I first got the job back in 2011, my position
was “Administrative Assistant”—which meant that I was to provide administrative
support to many different sectors the organization embraces. My first
check off list said things like:
•
LAP
•
info@fmcpaware.org emails
•
Support Groups
•
Forums
•
Wall of Courage
•
Magazine
I can’t remember all that was on the list, but I
remember being overwhelmed thinking, what in the world is LAP.
Seriously—I started my job being a fish completely out of water, and was never
actually trained. I started with a blank canvas in developing knowledge of what
it was I was exactly to do. On day one I remember staring at the email inbox
{which had thousands upon thousands of emails} wondering how I was going to
pull this off. Eventually, I got the slight hang of things and understood that
“LAP” stood for Leaders Against Pain, and that the “Wall of Courage” was a
photo wall on our website dedicated to people who have Fibromyalgia or Chronic
Pain—I even categorized and cleaned out/responded to all the emails that the
inbox that was overflowing with. It was winter of 2011 when my co-worker Angela
moved to Washington and thus, I was asked to fill her shoes temporarily until
we found someone else. This is when I learned how to reconcile accounts.
For a period of time I was our organizations
accountant, monitoring all the money that was coming in and going out. I was
still maintaining my somewhat secretarial duties but was regulating donations,
our store inventory and sending out invoices to people in need of them. We
never got a replacement.
Along with reconciling the accounts, I was given
the opportunity to be the “Art Director” and help edit and design a “Guide to
creating a local walk to CURE FM” manual—which was a manual guided to help
those around the nation create fundraising events in an organized and
structured way {you can view the manual, here}
That has been one of the most exciting things I
personally got to work on and taught me a lot. Up until late April of 2012 I
continued these accumulated duties, when I unexpectedly moved home for the
summer {May-August 2012}. My boss was understanding and told me when I left:
“Once you have your school schedule for fall sorted
out, come talk to me and we’ll figure you out a schedule.”
For starters, how cool is my boss? She gave me the
entire summer off and guaranteed me a position when I came back to Logan.
Grateful doesn’t even begin to explain it.
Upon my arrival in August 2012, I picked up on the
duties I had left off on, except the accounting, which had been taken over by
my co-worker Stacie, and jumped on some new responsibilities. That is when I
became the NFMCPA’s “Social Media Specialist”, which, by all means, is way
heftier of a title than I deserve, but I took over the social media aspect of
our organization and that’s what I was being referred to as. I then was able to
get more involved with the Leaders Against Pain, which are a group of
volunteers throughout the nation dedicated to spreading awareness and educating
others on the seriousness of chronic pain illnesses. We collectively created
network pages for each state on Facebook to provide a place for those with
Fibromyalgia or some other chronic pain illness to communicate with one another
and find support. I began a Pinterest campaign, worked on the NFMCPA’s
Facebook page, and began working more directly with the Fibromyalgia
and chronic pain community.
While continuing the social media pursuit, I
continued doing the regular duties that I always had been like answering
emails/phone calls, shipping out magazines, updating and helping maintain our website
etc…
Come the new year {2013} it was time to prepare for
May. May 12th is known by the chronic pain
community was “awareness day”. Our organization works hard to promote a
different campaign each year in regards to awareness day. This year’s theme
was:
“C.A.R.E. & Make Fibromyalgia
Visible”
C.A.R.E. stood for Contribute, Advocate, Research,
and Educate. While the previous year I wasn’t extremely involved with
awareness day (because I had moved home), this year was a different story. I
was blessed to work as the “events coordinator” for the organization and got to
work with many people throughout the nation, and in some cases,
internationally, in helping organize different events that were being planned.
This has been one of my favorite responsibilities. While it was crazy and
stressful at times, the knowledge I gained and the people I got to speak with
provided priceless insight. May came to a close and I decided to stay and work
for the summer. The events side has faded a bit since awareness day is done, but
I still every once in a while get to work with people in that aspect.
June came along and it was time to revamp our
store. I was grateful for the chance to get to design t-shirts for our
organization, which are now being sold in our online store. This project was
one of the more stressful ones, given that I had a very short deadline to get
things done, but it too provided to be a fun and insightful experience. The
t-shirts were finally finished {as in we could go pick them up} yesterday, and
it’s an understatement to say that I felt like a little kid at Christmas! You
can only hope everything turns out looking the way you want it because you
can’t just take back 500+ t-shirts. So that was nerve wracking, but everything
turned out as anticipated.
Currently, I’m not sure what to call myself here at
work. I am continually updating the social media aspects of my job, while
continuing my administrative duties, but for the most part I find my own work.
The project I am working on right now is updating the support group listings we
have on our website. I didn’t realize starting this project that there were
hundreds of support groups listed from all over the country—so this may take me
longer than I initially expected. However, I’ve found it to be potentially the most
rewarding project out of all the ones I've been privileged to undertake. I’ve
gotten to talk to many former and current support group leaders and can I just
say that the people I work with and for are amazing? I find myself sometimes
getting caught up on the phone in conversation with these people because of the
wonderful stories their lives are composed of. I love my job and the
opportunities it has brought for me.
That was long—my bad, team. This is why I can’t
really quite answer to people when they ask me “What exactly do you do at
work?” It changes every day and I never know what to expect. All I can say is
that I’m working with some amazing people and I have learned a lot. I often
feel like I am too young and inexperienced to get to do the things I’ve been
asked to do—but I take it with a full heart and will forever remain grateful.
-meg
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