Thank you to Drew Fass!

Some of the unsung heroes in our community are the community development interns who have been helping our community grow over the past several years. Often their contributions go unrecognized so we wanted to give Drew Fass a proper farewell after an amazing year. He’s completed his year-long internship and is now back to full-time studies at the University of Washington.  You might not know but we’ve created a program of bringing on community development interns through the Chi Psi fraternity at the University of Washington that is now in its fifth generation.

Along the way they’ve helped to formalize the procedures and programs to effectively engage with all members of our community. Starting with Braden Timm who compiled all of our contacts into Insightly, our first CRM. Ollie Janders then led the transition over to Salesforce for our CRM and contact management, while famously fighting poverty with financial inclusion with a lightsaber! Next came Andrew Mottet who streamlined and perfected the communications cycle and systematized into Google Drive templates and playbook that he used to smoothly on board Drew. Over the past six months, Drew Fass has now worked hand in hand with Jacob Kobzi as he passed over the torch.

Faster Fass – Always Excelling

Drew Fass astounded us at every step of the way. He recently got accepted into the Electrical Engineering program and despite an intensive courseload the past year, he never missed a task, in fact he far exceeded every expectations. Drew embraced his internship with a passion and a drive like no other. I witnessed it firsthand when he accompanied me to LinuxFest Northwest and watched him morph into a confident rockstar as he gave an invigorated and articulate story on why individuals should volunteer for Mifos.  Wherever he’s helped, he’s excelled whether it be in engaging new partners, research and due diligence including an incredible briefing on the microfinance opportunity in Cuba, website optimizations, or building out a kit for starting up Mifos chapters.

I formed many incredible memories with Drew including our memorable weekend in Austin – he wrote a fantastic blog post in which his quote even got featured by OSCON:

“It was very powerful holding the conference in Austin, as it shows how open source is now truly a national movement and is being embraced across the country. . . With the new venue came a host of new organizations and new speakers, all with new views and stories on how open source has helped advance their respective fields”

We got to watch the University of Texas Longhorn commencement rehearsal, observe the cockroaches tiptoe past our pillows in our motel in Austin, and watching TexMex as we watched the Warriors in the NBA Playoffs.

Community Impact

Many of you have probably had a chance to be on a partner discovery call with Drew but if you haven’t spoken to him personally, he’s impacted the community in countless ways. Chances are if you’ve joined our community in the past year, it’s because of Drew. First off, he solidified our procedures for onboarding interns – now there’s a comprehensive guide for the next interns to follow outlining every step from initializing trial instances to preparing board reports to converting partner leads in Salesforce.

Drew, building off of the work of our past three interns, and in tandem with Jacob has created a comprehensive communications cycle to ensure that every inbound lead that comes through any channel is engaged with and effectively onboarded through the community. This has been so incredibly valuable in ensuring we never miss an opportunity to connect with a new volunteer, onboard a new partner or welcome a new user. Drew and Jacob ensure that I’m on every Discovery Call or Follow-up call and we never miss a beat.

Where Drew most excelled was where he independently took the initiative to take projects on his self. Drew picked up some of the many fledgling community projects I had started, brought new life to them, and solidified them into rock-solid programs that we’re now acting upon.

This final summer when he wasn’t summiting mountains with his dad, he crafted some special projects of his own. For Partner Certification, he took our rough rubric for calculating certification points and crafted it into a nifty Google Form that automatically calculates the score based on partner inputs. For our Mifos Chapter, he took the rough chapter charter and guide for starting a chapter and polished into a self-driven comprehensive Chapter Startup Kit including a complete website template.

He also did an incredible job in not only passing the torch to Jacob but being there to guide him hand in hand at each stage of learning. Jacob has been an instrumental part of all they’ve accomplished and is now seeking out the sixth generation of Mifos Community Development intern.

Thank You!

Join us in thanking Drew for his work over the past year and wish him the best of luck as he continues his Electrical Engineering studies. We look forward to seeing his continued contributions as a volunteer in not only developing the community but developing software and writing code as well.