Interview with Emily Smedley

Emily Smedley (class of 2016) was a former Beautiful Social Research Collaborative consultant and Foley Fellow. Emily currently works as the Communications and Program Manager at Lancaster Clean Water Partners. Her company has many different partners that collaborate and work towards cleaner water in Lancaster County. Before her company started, there were many different companies working towards clean water in Lancaster, but they weren’t collaborating. So they decided to come together to create a greater good collectively. They currently have 40-50 partner organizations.

As the Communications and Program Manager, Emily does many different things for her company. One of the things she does is manage communication between her company and the many various partners. She also manages the companies website and social media. As part of managing the website, Emily writes blog posts that can be anything from one-pagers, infographics, or annual reports. She also manages what they call action teams which she says is similar to our own teams at Beautiful Social. So each group is working on something different. The groups vary from specializing in planting trees, agriculture, and water quality monitoring. Emily helps facilitate every group by helping them conduct their meetings, update their goals, and update and monitor their strategies. Emily also leads a DEI committee which is a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion committee. This committee comes together to make sure that DEI values are implemented in all aspects of their work.

I then asked Emily two questions. The first one being: “What do you think Beautiful Social helped teach you about what you like or don’t like when looking at a company to work for?”.

Emily said the main thing she learned from Beautiful Social is working for a cause you care about. She finds it difficult to work hard for a company or cause that she doesn’t care about. Emily says it is so much easier for her to work hard and produce good work for a cause she cares about. Through Beautiful Social, Emily also learned she had a passion for video projects and didn’t really like working on website projects. Beautiful Social also helped her learn how to have a real career in a non-profit. Emily said that Beautiful Social does really teach you what you like and don’t like when looking for a job because there are so many different opportunities. We do so many different projects for different causes and companies that it can really show you what you like to do.

Then I asked Emily my second question: “What skills or any notable experiences did you gain through Beautiful Social?”.

Emily said she really enjoyed her time as Fellow for Beautiful Social because it really helped teach her how to lead a group. It also helped teach her how to be an intermediator between her team and community partner. Beautiful Social helped teach her that everyone can be a leader in their own way. She said the opportunity to develop these skills so early and with so many different partners was an invaluable experience. Whenever Emily was interviewed for a job, the first thing people asked about was Beautiful Social.