CIBER-funded Internship Research in the Peruvian Rainforest

As the full-time office manager for the Wharton Global Consulting Practicum (GCP) at the University of Pennsylvania, I work with MBA students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends from Wharton and other leading international business schools. During the 2004-2005 academic year, the GCP was involved in 17 projects (14 based in Philadelphia and 3 at Wharton West in San Francisco). We worked with partner schools in Chile, Colombia, India, Israel, Jamaica, and Peru. The participants included 89 Wharton MBA students from 18 nations, 11 teaching assistants who were GCP'04 graduates, and 19 faculty members.

The WGCP is a consulting organization embedded in Wharton which pairs 4-6 students from Wharton with 4-6 students from another university who then work for a fee-paying client. Together, they consult for senior managers of international companies who want to enter or improve their position in the North American market. Throughout the spring semester the student team researches, analyzes and develops detailed strategic and tactical plans to meet their clients' goals. Each student also travels to their client's home country for one week in January to work with the client and partner team and presents key insights at major project milestones. Students collaborate with senior managers to determine the scope of the work to be done.
http://mktgweb.wharton.upenn.edu/gcpcourse/

I am also pursuing a Master of Science in Education (M.S.Ed.) in Intercultural Communication (ICC) at Penn's Graduate School of Education.

ICC coursework prepares students to address problems that arise from cultural differences in values, assumptions and modes of interaction and to work in educational, social service, business, governmental, or intergovernmental agency settings. Students learn to analyze cultural and behavioral issues encountered in the interaction of individuals from different ethnic and national backgrounds.
http://www.gse.upenn.edu/degrees_programs/led_icc.php

These two different responsibilities converged in January 2005 when Penn Lauder CIBER financially supported my ICC internship goal of tracking one of the GCP student teams. The project I selected was of particular interest to me, as it involved working on a new type of GCP project, called Social Impact Management (SIM), which began in 2004. I had studied in Spain as an undergraduate student, worked in Nicaragua for a year in the mid-1990s, and have ten years of management experience. Combining these experiences with my ICC coursework, I decided that this particular SIM project, focused on the Yanesha people in Peru, would be a good match for my intended research.

The Yanesha people date back to pre-Incan times and are indigenous to the Palcazu Valley in Peru. Working as artisans with Partnerships and Technology for Sustainability (PaTS) allows the Yanesha to earn fair wages and provide for their families. PaTS is a non-profit organization that links the Yanesha with markets in the United States, empowering them to sell their products to earn a living without exploiting their natural resources.
http://www.patsperu.org/

The student team's goals were to help PaTS obtain an external evaluation of their organization, to make contacts in the United States that would open up new marketing possibilities for the Yanesha wood and textile products, and to expose more people to the hands-on success of the PaTS-Yanesha collaboration. My ICC research interest was to follow the PaTS team through the GCP process and observe the intercultural team dynamics.

The GCP is simultaneously a very demanding and rewarding course. I followed the students from their initial applications through their interviews (October 2004), acceptance and project assignments (November 2004), and pre-departure workshops (December 2004). The three-hour-a-week class at Wharton ran from January through April and culminated in the GCP Colloquium in May 2005.

The Penn Lauder CIBER funding enabled me to travel with the Wharton students to Peru in January 2005 to meet the other members of the team from La Universidad del Pacifico in Lima and, more importantly, to travel with the entire team to meet the Yanesha artisans in their rainforest home. Traveling three days into the forest over rugged, rocky roads, crossing swollen rivers in 4x4 trucks, and then walking along part of the Amazon gave me a real appreciation for the distribution problems PaTS faces in getting the products to Lima and, in some cases, getting the artisans to the various work sheds where their products are created.

Having this one-on-one time with the students, artisans, and PaTS team was invaluable. It provided me with concentrated observation opportunities and a chance to take field notes and tape working sessions for later analysis. Since we were eating, sleeping, traveling, and working side-by-side for an intense seven days, I was not only an observer but also a participant. I helped set up and break camp by loading and unloading the trucks, documented the trip as the photographer, and assisted in coordinating logistics with Amy Smith, the PaTS project director. I also served as a Spanish translator when necessary. Everyone we encountered along our challenging journey was enthusiastic and supportive of this collaborative effort between the universities in the United States and Peru to identify creative solutions for bringing a business-oriented approach to forest conservation.

Don Francisco, one of the Yanesha elders and lead craftsman, explained how the Yanesha had experienced the loggers coming into the forest year after year, making empty promises to the community about giving back, and then ultimately paying minimum prices for the lumber they would strip from the Yanesha land. Now, Don Francisco explained, in conjunction with PaTS, there is a forestry management and inventory plan in place so that over a thirty-year period the same plot of land is tapped only once. This allows sufficient time for the land to naturally regenerate a source of lumber for the wood and textile products. Don Francisco further noted that this long-term planning offers a new way for the community to operate; not just looking for a quick and easy financial fix for the immediate needs of the local families, but also investing in the future of their children and their grandchildren. He stressed that PaTS had gained the trust of the people by working closely with them since 2001, recruiting new artisans, and establishing training workshops, in addition to developing leaders within the Yanesha who could serve as liaisons between the people and PaTS.

I could not have fully understood the project without meeting the artisans in person on their land, on their terms. It was important for me to hear their personal stories of struggle and hope and to see for myself the hardships they face in earning a livable wage. One of my most important observations was how this striking information was translated to the students and how they thus approached the GCP project overall. I believe that regardless of what the students felt going into the project, they ultimately did not view the client as just a customer after the January trip into the Amazon's Palcazu Valley. Instead of just being a product to be marketed to the U.S. consumer, this was now the livelihood of the Pea family and the larger community at stake. One of the long-term goals of PaTS is to further develop the financial sustainability of the Yanesha and create a successful model that can be transferred to other Peruvian tribes.

The student team completed its project in May 2005 by making formal recommendations for new initiatives to the PaTS team. As I continue to analyze my ethnographic data for my ICC internship thesis, I have been able to reflect ever more deeply on my experiences. I am extremely grateful to Penn Lauder CIBER for providing the financial and professional support to make this critical week in Peru a reality. This trip was key to the success of my intercultural communication research. It was a time when the students came together as a team and built a solid foundation upon which to scope out the parameters for their consulting project.

As a direct result of the GCP project recommendations, PaTS has now teamed up with a local organization, the Amazon Center for Environmental Education and Research (ACEER), based in West Chester, PA. PaTS is continuing to develop its website with educational and product information and is investigating ways in which eco-tourism trips to the Palcazu Valley can help spread the Yanesha story, as we saw first-hand in the Amazon rainforest. PaTS is also continuing to expand the availability of the Yanesha products in the US market.

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