Olayinka Omole has always had a passion for hunger relief work, writing about it whenever she was given free reign at school.
For the last 2 ½ years, Omole, who lives in Georgia, has been working remotely for FFEN as a data analysis intern. She came to FFEN while working on her master’s in public health, and has been cleaning data, formatting it and putting it into the FFEN database to aid in the creation of Strategic Food Sourcing Analysis reports. These individual reports to food shelves help their leaders understand what kind of food they’re spending the most money on and the associated costs, to help with budgeting.
“I got to learn from a lot of different professionals with a lot of different insights,” Omole said.
It also showed her the larger impact of hunger relief work.
“Working with the service statistics data, I could see how many children, how many seniors per month were impacted – these numbers are larger than I would have imagined,” she said.
Jenny Moore, program coordinator at FFEN, extended Omole’s internship to help during a technology upgrade at FFEN.
“It was incredibly helpful to have her on staff during those transitions when we were seeing such massive change,” Moore said. “She knew our specific processes and could provide skilled and technical answers. She was a subject matter expert and a rock during that time.”
Omole also created tutorial videos on formatting, importing and exporting data, refreshing dashboards and creating pivot tables, that can be used to onboard new volunteers.
