5 Questions with Elsbeth Willis
Manager, Nonprofit Operations, Association Solutions
1. What is your role at MCI?
I am the operations manager for the AS division, so we do whatever flies at us, from preparing financial papers, to setting up configurations, events, and prices in their database. The majority of what I do is database administration, to ensure that the association members are being properly served.
I’ve been at MCI about two years, working fully remotely from Austin. I love my team; the ops team is small but mighty and I have a lot of respect for the people I work with.
2. How do you stay connected with your colleagues being 100 percent remote?
I’m on the AS Celebration and Recognition Committee, so I help plan the holiday parties and events and interact with people regularly through this role because I need the socialization. We run meetings every month, celebrating birthdays and anniversaries, and we organize and host the holiday parties. We also coordinate a lot of the service projects for each office. If anyone is interested in joining, reach out to Amy Lotz, because we can use more people on this committee!
And then each week, I run Punday Monday, where I post in the AS General chat each week, two random prompts to combine to create your best pun and everyone votes on it, (i.e. things you find in the gym and cocktails). Anyone can post their pun and then vote on their favorite! I’m a creative person in a non-creative role so I love to have fun with things like this.
I also host the Wellness Wednesdays each week and I lead the Women and Allies ERG.
3. How did Wellness Wednesdays come about?
In one of our Celebration and Recognition Committees, someone suggested having a stretching break as an event. I thought that it should be a regular thing instead, so I took it upon myself to run Wellness Wednesdays because I’m currently getting my yoga and meditation teaching certification.
I think it’s important to have a regular meeting so people can come and stretch and doing a breathing exercise and get back in touch with themselves and their bodies. Especially working remotely, we don’t get up and move our bodies enough. We have about 15-20 people who attend each week, so it’s been great!
4. What does the Women and Allies ERG do?
We do one event or presentation each quarter for all of MCI to join and we also donate to different organizations each year that support those who identify as female. We just had the Women’s History Month session where I got a speaker to run a storytelling workshop, so everyone got to tell their own story. The feedback we got was great. It was an exercise in tapping into your creativity and feminine energy and what makes your womanhood your womanhood. Our next meeting will be in July, but we haven’t planned that yet.
5. Where do you channel your energy outside of work?
Besides getting my yoga and meditation teacher certification, I love to stay active, so I do dance and boxing classes, but I also make time to channel my creative side!
I’m currently working on producing a podcast about all the things in our society that are legal but evil, so doing the research for that takes up a lot of time. I’m also a poet and I’m working on publishing my first full manuscript. However, I’d like it to be published as a series of videos instead of just written. I work with local artists and musicians, and I send them the piece and have them create whatever visual or auditory piece that it invokes within them. In poetry, the inflections where you pause are significant, including in my works and I never understood why there wasn’t an auditory element to published poems, which sparked this idea. It’s taken years so far, but it will be awesome once it gets finished.
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