My third week at Local Matters was dominated by my transition from observing to acting. I mentioned last week how important it was for me to create a foundation of intentional listening to build my work off of – that building phase is here!!

The wide variety of programming that Local Matters offers and oversees is incredible in the many impacts that it has on the community, but often frustrating when it comes to logistical organization. There are so many details that need to be overseen and coordinated to make these programs run smoothly, and there is a wealth of data that needs to be collected on the outcomes and outputs of programming. Community educators need to know if their classes are impactful in the way they are intended to be, grant writers need to know the overall impact of programming to solicit funds and thus continue to increase our impact, and employees need to generally know how their work is making a collective difference at the end of the day. As it turns out, this isn’t easy! As of right now most of this information is stored in different places by different people, which is a significant hurdle to Local Matters being the best organization that it can be.

Introducing Airtable: an online database that “gives you the building blocks to create your own way of organizing anything, from film projects to apartments hunts and customer lists.” (quoted from Airtable’s friendly website). A few fun tidbits about me: I can’t survive academically, professionally, or socially without a paper planner, I wholeheartedly believe in the power of checklists, and I have a strong affinity for organization and overall cleanliness. So, when I was presented with an array of Airtable databases that needed to be integrated and standardize with one another, all containing different types of data on Local Matters programming, I was more than ecstatic to jump in. Stay tuned for next week’s post to hear the outcome of this building adventure!