As a second-year student at Â鶹AV studying Environment and Development, I am extremely grateful to have had the opportunity to intern at The Green Stop this past summer. My studies involve a mix of natural sciences, social sciences, and Economics, and I was glad to be able to gain a deeper understanding of the intersections between the three throughout the past few months. I was already interested in Social Entrepreneurship when this opportunity to work for a social and environmental startup company came to fruition. This experience working closely with the Founder of the Green Stop allowed me to observe the challenges of being an entrepreneur, which is something I have been more interested in lately. For the past few years, I have gained a deep interest in sustainable business. I thought that working with The Green Stop, whose mission is to reduce the amount of plastic pollution in the world, would be a great opportunity for me to discover firsthand how businesses can create positive solutions to environmental problems.
I love the fact that The Green Stop is a startup company; as I believed when I first decided to work for them, I found that there was a plethora of work to be done in terms of logistics and operations in order to ensure the rental services ran smoothly (since the company is newly established). This was also a great opportunity for me to find out firsthand about how a for-profit company can fully embrace sustainability in its supply chain and through social and economic factors. My objectives for the internship was to learn what it was like to be in an administrative position at a small company, since prior to this internship I had only had jobs in the service industry.
The Green Stop works to eliminate the need for single use plastics by providing water infrastructure at public spaces. Initially, The Green Stop was geared towards music festivals, where they rented out water refill stations to events. This previously served as a great market to which we could tend, but the COVID pandemic greatly changed the landscape of our business and target market. Since March, we have retrofitted our water refill stations to become touchless and have included social distance panels. Additionally, we have created a new station, also touchless, that serves as a hand washing station. The goal here is to provide alternatives to using plastic disposable water bottles and plastic disposable gloves and hand sanitizer bottles.
One of the biggest highlights of this internship was being able to get to know my team so well, even though we were solely online, since the team was so small. There are only four people currently working at The Green Stop, two of which are interns. This allowed me to explore various parts of the organization, working on design, communications, marketing, and writing, which is likely something that is more difficult to do at a large organization where the work is more specialized.
Although I did not receive academic credit for this internship, I believe that it will help me out greatly once I start my minor in Social Entrepreneurship this semester. Rachel, the Founder of The Green Stop, really demonstrated entrepreneurial spirit this summer, managing and adapting to the new situation she was thrown into with the pandemic.
On my part, it took quite an adjustment to be able to work efficiently in a remote environment. Luckily, since the team I worked with was so small, they made themselves readily available and answered questions I had in a timely manner. Once I found a good routine for myself, it was more bearable to sit down alone in my apartment and get to work. I truly did enjoy the work that I was doing: co-writing the marketing and business plan, designing a one-page green report for a client, completing market research for prospective clients, and taking charge of the company email account, responding to client’s requests and inquiries in both French and English.
The funds that I received for this internship helped me tremendously this summer; I was able to continue living in Montreal in my apartment, and the scholarship covered all my food and living expenses. I am extremely grateful to the Morris and Rosalind Goodman Family Foundation for enabling and funding this award, without whom I would not have been able to support myself throughout the summer. Thank you again tremendously for this opportunity. Maybe someday you will see our water stations around Montreal!
