As a graduate assistant at Fordham, Sharan Sekhon (’26) had the opportunity to manage SPES NOVA at Fordham University. SpesNova is an international organization that manifests through student chapters in universities worldwide. These student chapters help expand Global South artisan markets by selling the artisan’s products in their communities hundreds to thousands of miles away. SpesNova at Fordham is the central part of the organization, connecting various student chapters to each other. We coordinate with schools as close as St. Thomas Aquinas in New York and as far as Pontifica Universidad Javeriana Cali in Colombia.
As a graduate assistant, Sharan is responsible for sourcing new partner artisans, maintaining established relationships, organizing the procurement of products, conducting market analyses of where the products will be sold, and working on the SPES NOVA website. Also, she is responsible for the student chapter of SpesNova at Fordham. She is their advisor and is present in all their meetings, organizing sales and encouraging/introducing best practices for running an organization of this scale. She started her time at SpesNova by building an internal structure for the student organization and helping them establish roles and responsibilities. This semester, they have worked on sales goal building and project management to achieve their goals.
Currently, she is working on improving the website and procuring products for the upcoming academic year. Website improvements focus on building a system where partner university student chapters can manage their pages under the larger SpesNova website. This will allow them to gain independence in keeping track of their online orders by campus rather than us looking at them centrally. Product procurement will replenish best sellers, including knitwear, stone home goods, and new products like snacks and accessories, which are currently being modified per the Fordham chapter’s recommendations for our local market.