Happy Friday! I hope everyone had a wonderful 4th yesterday! I ate some cake, saw some fireworks, and pet a dog, so it was a perfect day for me! (:

Week 5 has been a short but productive one here at the GIAC! This week has involved the set-up for Red, White, and Boom–the GIAC is right at the Scioto Audubon Metro Park, so this is a prime spot to watch the fireworks. We’ve had helicopters coming in and Metro Parks rangers setting everything up for thousands of people to be here Wednesday night. There were even people camped out at 10 am Wednesday morning so they could get the best spot!

Monday involved re-organizing supplies from camp and running a few errands, and I also learned how to feed our snapping turtles, Allie and Snaps (good news–I still have all my fingers!) And Tuesday was a big day because I got to meet with our Executive Director and my supervisor to refine my proposal to promote some of the GIAC’s new initiatives to present at next week’s board meeting! We have discussed some ideas since the beginning of my fellowship, but with camp and the education programs, we had to set that aside for a bit.

And for these few weeks, I’ve been a little unsure of how I could come up with something that would have a meaningful impact. Our Executive Director told me that she is confident that I have the experience to establish a leadership and outreach initiative, but I haven’t been so sure. I definitely feel like “just” an intern sometimes, like Aubrey wrote about in her post, so that’s been a hard feeling to shake as I’ve tried to think about the GIAC’S strengths and needs in developing a longer-term project. But the staff’s encouragement and appreciation–my supervisor made my day and got me a gorgeous sunflower plant and my FAVORITE dark chocolate last week!–has really shown me that they value my ideas and experience, and I need to keep that in mind whenever I start having self-doubts.

So after talking through our goals for this new initiative, we came up with the idea to plan a conference on local environmental justice. On a local scale, environmental justice refers to the movement to ensure that environmental benefits and burdens are not disproportionately placed on certain groups or locations–for example, people and communities who have been marginalized by race- and socioeconomic-based systems of injustice are often more likely to be exposed to unsafe air and water quality. This is a topic that I have become passionate about throughout my classes at OSU, and as we see Columbus move towards policies that environmental concerns, it is my strong belief that any action taken to address climate change must be centered around environmental justice. Otherwise, those who have privilege will still not be held accountable for their role in creating environmental damage and causing harm towards people who may not have such privilege.

Environmental justice is a massive concept, interconnected with many movements and systems that are part of everyday life for all of us, so it’s difficult to narrow it down and think about it on a local scale here in Columbus. I realized that after three years of talking about environmental justice in my classes, I still have little understanding of the specific issues that affect residents and neighborhoods right here throughout the city. I have a problem with that–how can we expect to work towards change if we aren’t aware of the issues affecting our own corners of the world? That’s what made me think of this conference as a way for the GIAC to bring together environmental organizations, local advocates and organizers, residents, students, city leaders, and others to be intentional about addressing specific injustices and concerns.

I only have four weeks left, so my main role for the rest of the summer with respect to this conference will be to come up with a pitch to our board next week about our goals and intentions. I will need to discuss why this conference is needed, what it could accomplish, and why it centers around the GIAC’s mission. If the board approves it, I don’t know what role I can play in helping to plan it, but I know that I will need to start making connections and doing some research to learn more about the concerns residents have and the actions that have already taken place.

This all still feels really big and scary to me, and I’m not sure how high these ideas will get off the ground. I was dwelling on the “bigness” of this when, on the way to a program at a local church Wednesday morning, we passed a mural with a dandelion next to the words “I am not a weed, but a wish.” This sounds really cheesy, but it made me think about how I should look for the possibilities in any situation rather than what could go wrong. With something that seems so big and scary, it’s easy for us to feel like we will fail, but we need to think about all the ways that something can go right, too, as long as we take it step by step. I don’t need to have all my contacts made and a whole conference planned in a week–I just need to share why it’s a possibility we should pursue.

The program we were on our way to reminded me of this, because we just spent a couple hours walking around the church and looking for the nature around us. We didn’t need to find every single tree or insect or bird at once–by taking it a moment at a time, we still got to our goal of learning from and being in nature. So while I’m still going to be a little nervous moving forward and trying to get these ideas transformed into action, I just need to take it one moment at a time, knowing that I have the support of our staff and my own strengths I can draw from.

So along with planning for the board meeting and hopefully recovering from yesterday’s sunburns, I’m also looking forward to next week and planning for upcoming 10th anniversary events and starting some weekend shifts to welcome visitors into the center!

Thanks for sticking with my rambling, and I hope everyone has a great weekend! (:

Kenzie