100,000 Steps in New York: Internship Notes from the Open Society Justice Initiative (Part 1)

Overview of the PFP Program and OSJI: Them and Us

1. About the Professional Fellows Program (PFP)

   ■ Who organizes it? Do I need to pay?

   This program is co-organized by the American Institute in Taiwan and the U.S. NGO National Committee on US China Relations. Flight tickets, daily living allowances, and domestic train travel within the U.S. are fully sponsored by the U.S. government. They also help arrange homestays at the internship location, meaning no extra lodging expenses and providing highly comprehensive insurance. Although the overall administrative efficiency can be quite exasperating, they will arrange everything properly before you board the plane, or at the very latest moment. This is true for every cohort, so future applicants can rest assured.

   ■ How to apply? Subsequent timeline?

   I applied for the spring program, submitting my application in August 2022. The application required an English resume and answers to many soul-searching career questions. What requires earlier preparation is obtaining the contact information of three recommenders. Once entered, the system automatically emails the three recommenders, asking them to upload their recommendation letters into the system.

   An online interview took place in late September. The interview actually consisted mostly of career soul-searching—understanding your own tasks, roles at work, and what you hope to see in the U.S., with the rest being casual conversation. Next came a long wait, long enough to make you think you might have been rejected. Then, at a fleeting moment when you had already forgotten you applied for the program (in my case, December 24, 2022), an email arrived notifying me of my acceptance! (It sounds silly, but that is how it goes.)

   Upon receiving the acceptance notification, the only information provided synchronously was the departure and return dates (but don't worry, they buy the tickets anyway. This program issues a J-visa, which is very useful if you have needs to arrive early or return late. If you don't mind the email exchanges to coordinate with them, you can try negotiating). You do not immediately find out your internship placement, homestay, or the hundred other questions you have in mind before going abroad.

   One of those questions might be wanting to know how the entire itinerary will be arranged? Because they send notification letters quite late (there will be an orientation session in Taiwan about a week before departure!), I can share past experiences: it is roughly divided into three stages. The first stage is a welcome in Washington, allowing partners from the East Asia region to get to know one another. After the second stage, everyone is assigned to their respective organizations and lives with their respective homestay families. The third stage, which is the final week, brings everyone back together in Washington to attend the Professional Fellows Congress for three consecutive days with nearly three hundred partners from around the world—not just East Asia—to share and discuss what they gained during their internships.

   Because many partners actually have extensive international networking experience and may have many friends or work partners to meet locally in the U.S., dinners during those days in Washington can basically be arranged with others if needed. If not arranged, the organizers will also take everyone to restaurants together, allowing you to meet partners from China, Hong Kong, and Mongolia. However, you should still reserve some time to adjust to jet lag during those days.

   ■ Where will you be assigned?

   During the application process, you are asked to fill in your preferences for internship organizations. Since this program is for NGO professionals, they hope to place everyone in a location with missions similar to your original organization. However, that is merely a guiding direction for the organizers to make contacts; they customize the search to find an organization suitable for you. There were seven other Taiwan partners in my cohort, including some who just stepped into management like me, very experienced managers, and non-managers, coming from both NGOs and social enterprises. Everyone had different learning needs and was subsequently assigned to different organizations across the U.S. (including Washington, Manhattan, Buffalo, Milwaukee, covering both cities and rural areas).

   Perhaps because the task of finding organizations is so arduous, some people did not find out which organization they were assigned to until their second day of arriving in the U.S. while attending the welcome events in Washington.

   Interestingly, this program actually has a return-visit mechanism; someone from the organization you visit might also have the opportunity to apply for an internship at your organization in the future.

   ■ Preparations in Advance

   I was relatively lucky; I learned about my internship placement around the end of March, which allowed me to hold a video meeting in advance with the office manager and supervisor of that organization to introduce who I am and what my organization does, enabling both sides to pre-consider appropriate arrangements.

   During the internship period, daytime working hours coordinate with the organization. The organizers also remind fellows not to arbitrarily arrange personal travel, but weeknights and weekends are entirely your own time. Some people meet friends, while others discuss work right there; in short, there will be time to make arrangements. In reality, because most people are busy to the point of madness before departure (after all, leaving one's original job for six weeks), most of the networking and errands I planned to accomplish in the U.S. were only handled during the first week while suffering from jet lag insomnia, and everything still worked out in time.

   Additionally, based on information from the orientation session held in Taiwan a week before departure, remember to bring: souvenir gifts (pineapple cakes are very popular; many people bring tea leaves); remember to purchase a SIM card or buy a 50G roaming package directly (this is not paid for by the U.S. government); prepare a 30-second self-introduction as you will need it at any moment; and otherwise, bring a courageous heart.

   Note: If you can find partners who were also accepted from Taiwan early on, everything will go much smoother. Ever since a partner created a Facebook group to share news with one another, half of the anxiety was reduced. There will always be someone adept at emailing organizers for updates to get information, and when organizers fail to notify people about certain matters for unknown reasons, information can be exchanged instantly.

2. Arriving and Beginning the Internship at the Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI)

   Upon arriving at the office on the first day, I discovered that the Open Society Foundations occupy an entire building! The unit I was in took up just one floor. Because it was Monday, walking into the office revealed no one else in the sprawling office space except the executive director, the office manager, and my supervisor. Even though they provided free lunch every day, in the post-pandemic era, it remains difficult to make employees fond of coming into the office to work.

   ■ What kind of organization is this?

   The Open Society Foundations (OSF) is a well-known non-profit grantmaker founded by George Soros, providing financial support to civil society organizations worldwide. Wikipedia states that their goal is to promote the development of justice, education, public health, and independent media, with different priority issues in each phase, all aimed at eliminating the risks to open societies. Foundation employees speak fluently of "the threat to this open society." Having undergone a wave of organizational streamlining over the past two years, the organization still has over a thousand employees.

   The Open Society Justice Initiative (OSJI), where I was placed, is a sub-unit beneath them with 40 employees, 30 of whom are full-time attorneys. Their primary mission is to help OSF's mission find useful strategic litigation and promote advocacy work through this format.

   ※ Note: Their executive director once visited Taiwan. Covenants Watch record: [International Workshop on Human Rights Strategic Litigation] Lecture I: Objectives, Principles, and Impact Factors of Strategic Litigation

   Before the organizational streamlining, OSJI once had nearly 85 employees, meaning they cut about half of their staff. Most of these individuals came from the advocacy department; now, only a single OSF advocacy liaison serves as their direct counterpart, and OSJI no longer operates an independent advocacy department.

   However, layoffs do not merely impact those who are let go. For those who remain, it is impossible to continue their original work unchanged. Through individual interviews, I came to understand that this organizational streamlining relatively affected various arrangements regarding management tasks, the roles of full-time attorneys, and organizational objectives.

   There are two primary changes, which actually represent classic propositional choices for justice advocacy groups: How should task allocation be structured? How should cross-departmental communication be handled? Their choices at this stage result in different working models:

   1. In the past, the relationship between the advocacy department and the litigation department was tense because they focused on different priorities. Full-time attorneys felt their strategic litigation inherently carried advocacy goals—handling cases was inherently doing advocacy—and communicating and translating with the advocacy department consumed extra time, making it less efficient. But now, with no advocacy department at all, full-time attorneys are the primary agents of advocacy and can completely control the rhythm of advocacy. Nevertheless, they also admitted that when recruiting newcomers, it is not easy to find attorneys with an advocacy personality and interest (rather than just handling cases). Furthermore, because OSF still needs advocacy materials when requested, they must contact and request them from external sources. Thus, although internal communication costs are reduced, external communication remains necessary.

   2. Previously, departments were divided by themes, such as the climate change group, judicial independence group, and digital rule of law group. However, because OSF's core themes continue to shift and diminish, OSJI's core team currently feels that continuing such divisions would give entire groups a reason to be directly laid off. They should instead begin ensuring that everyone maintains a certain flexibility regarding issues, and they also want to start cultivating more people with managerial awareness regarding overall objectives (former supervisors only needed to manage a single topic). Currently, each supervisor manages a team ranging from 3 to 7 members, and each team does "not" correspond to a specific theme. Consequentially, the degree to which supervisors can provide substantive issue advice and control the trajectory of issues has declined. Conversely, full-time attorneys cannot specialize in specific topics as intensively as before, but their autonomy may have increased. From interviews, some like this and some do not.

   During the final internal meeting I attended before leaving New York, I learned that major news would soon be announced. After returning to Taiwan, I quickly saw the Open Culture Foundation announce leadership succession and another wave of layoffs in July. Overall, the way this organization operates is still undergoing changes.

   ■ What are OSJI's current primary issues of concern?

   OSJI's expertise lies in the tool of strategic litigation. Regarding issues, they do not have their own independent priority strategy; instead, they follow the overall strategy of the broader OSF, and OSJI is one of the few units within OSF that does "not" engage in grantmaking.

   As seen on their official website, their four major focal goals in recent years are: digital law, racial justice, climate change, and international crime. In many cases, OSJI actually plays an advisory role. Due to past civil rights litigation series, they have excellent connections with grassroots organizations in Kenya. The famous 2019 Kenyan eID case saw OSJI participate to the maximum extent possible, and their work reports list it as their most important case of 2019 (filed January 2019, injunction obtained April 2019, Kenya Personal Data Protection Act enacted September 2019, court of first instance ruling in 2020, currently on appeal). I also used this opportunity to summarize Taiwan's situation (they previously knew nothing about it, and I put a short essay up on the official website).

3. When the Initially Set Goals Don't Work, Don't Be Afraid—Speak Up and Change Them!

   I joined JRF in 2019 and quickly encountered the pandemic. My work from 2020 to 2022 was heavily focused locally, marking a very distinct contrast with the intensive international exchanges beginning in 2023. Because I don't use it frequently, my English is probably the poorest among those traveling together. However, my takeaway from living in the U.S. for the first two weeks was: Take charge of the rhythm (doesn't that sound like some commercial slogan?). Behind this mindset is the belief that: the fact that English is not our native language is not our fault, and we are already speaking very well.

   On my first day at the internship institution, out of habitual courtesy I opened by saying, "I'm sorry, I do mostly local work in Taiwan, so my English isn't very fluent, please bear with me"—typical Taiwanese politeness. But R, the office manager at OSJI, immediately replied: "No, it is we who are sorry; Americans speak only English their whole lives, putting the pressure of speaking a foreign language all on you." From that moment on, I stopped saying sorry and pretended I thought I was speaking quite well.

   Because I knew my internship organization relatively early, when discussing internship contents with them online while still in Taiwan, they arranged for relevant business colleagues to get to know me one-on-one based on my work in Taiwan, allowing both sides to think ahead about appropriate arrangements. On my first or second day of arriving in the U.S., they started sending me Google Calendar invites. At that time, while still participating in the welcome events in Washington, I excitedly told a nearby Taiwan fellow that I had been scheduled for meetings, only to find out that some more experienced fellows had already told their internship organizations outright that they were "not" going to spend time on such arrangements (because finishing that round of introductions would take about two weeks, and we only had four weeks), and that they wanted to clearly complete a specific project and contribute something to the internship organization. I thought this was a pretty good contrast. Depending on different levels of English proficiency and familiarity with the internship organization (some of our fellows were assigned to organizations they already knew in Taiwan, requiring less time to get acquainted with the organization and people), applicants can pre-determine their preference and communicate directly with the internship organization; the organizers do not micromanage.

   As the first week progressed, even though I had maintained an unbroken routine over the past two years of scheduling midnight online English lessons with a Philippine tutor every Monday to practice speaking English, in an environment like OSJI where colleagues come from all over the world (Japanese-Americans, Brazilians, Bosnians, British, etc.), I could basically only understand 30 to 50 percent of large meetings. Initially, I told my supervisor that I wanted to see how they conduct efficient meetings and discussions, so I attended a few. My supervisor was very kind and would mute the line during meetings (since it was connected online with other countries) to explain what the previous segment was about, but I still felt I was learning nothing.

   Therefore, while the one-on-one arrangements were originally intended just to help me familiarize myself with the organization and environment, at the end of the first week, after discussing with my supervisor, I decided to schedule a massive number of one-on-one meetings! In one-on-one meetings, I could speak first and control the rhythm, starting from introducing JRF and myself—things I was most fluent in. Because I had established the rhythm first, the other person would also match my speaking speed when telling me about their role in the organization, and I could continuously ask questions I wanted answered. If I didn't understand something, I could interrupt them directly before proceeding further.

   Under such a willful rhythm, I began my internship life.

4. Across the Straits, Across Life and Death, We Are Still on the Long Road

   My homestay was in Brooklyn, living on the second floor of a cozy little house with another PFP fellow. I really loved the chirping insects, birds, and abundance of big dogs in that neighborhood, but I had to ride the subway for 50 minutes with nearly zero cell signal just to reach the office—which seems to be the norm for New Yorkers, given Manhattan's exorbitant rents. Many people warned me that the neighborhood was relatively dangerous. Fortunately, summer days in New York don't grow dark until around 8:30 PM, and past that hour I would avoid taking the subway. One day I stayed out just a little past that time, and the streets were completely deserted—which was indeed somewhat terrifying, making me nostalgic for the freedom in Taiwan of being able to walk home leisurely after getting off work at 10 PM.

   Our homestay dad was a retired NGO management consultant who helped many local community NGOs in Brooklyn run consensus workshops and scale up. The very day my roommate and I arrived in New York, we were immediately whisked away to a community organization's consensus workshop, watching our homestay dad help them anchor and prioritize the problems their organization faced. During the internship, we also attended a fundraising dinner for an organization he founded in his youth. Sometimes, when I came home and shared what I learned at my internship organization that day, he would offer different perspectives to remind me: That is because you are inside an international organization that doesn't need to worry about fundraising; most other non-profits are nothing like that.

   I originally thought this would just be intellectual and physical support, but on the 8th day in the U.S., waking up early around 6 AM due to lingering jet lag, I scrolled through my phone and saw the news about Professor Lin Shu-ya (林淑雅) passing away in an accident on the Taichung Metro. Shocked awake, since I happened to have meetings that morning and didn't need to go into the office, I couldn't really control shedding some tears. In the afternoon, I went into the office, hastily wrapped up meetings, told my supervisor I truly wasn't doing well, and headed home early.

   Our homestay dad suggested I take a walk in the cemetery. I walked a very, very long road—about two hours—then went home to eat dinner cooked by our homestay parents. Among the Taiwan fellows visiting this time were a former Secretary-General of Amnesty International Taiwan and someone whose previous job focused on Tibet issues. Compared to them, I hadn't had the chance to work closely alongside Professor Lin, though I had assumed we eventually would.

   We were placed in an unfamiliar land, standing roadside surrounded by the loud, chaotic traffic of Manhattan, while no one around us knew that a major tragedy had occurred back in Taiwan. We were forced to be absent from everyone's tears and rituals. At such times, having someone say to me and my roommate, "Come home for dinner!" was truly a warm comfort. And sometimes, it is precisely such warmth that helps one pull themselves together.