At this point, we are over halfway done with the internships and I am getting into a solid rhythm with things at City Year.

This week started off with even more social media hype for the Regatta boat. Although City Year isn’t doing too hot as of today, I feel that the posts are getting plenty of engagement and that people appreciate them. I started interviewing and posing staff members with the boat and that has been a lot of fun for two reasons. First, it lets me work on these editing skills and learn more about Canva and other media creation/distribution websites. Secondly, I get to interact with staff members from different teams and see them in a more personal light. It’s bee interesting to see them share in their own words why they do their work at City Year Columbus and what matters to them. I also get to see them be a bit goofy and play a bit with the boat.

I also started doing some Asset Mapping work this week. It has involved finding the different areas and neighborhoods in which City Year serves, locating the different organizations that work within those boundaries and, eventually, will include lists of businesses, liaisons and community members which which City Year Columbus can work on creating lasting relationships. For the development team, this is useful because it helps us gauge who City Year stakeholders could approach in the future and what kinds of interests lie around the schools that we serve. It is also a useful tool for the organization, since our teams can now have a running list of people they can approach that are based right on the neighborhoods we serve and help disseminate information and receive feedback from a bottom-up perspective.

As a side note, this has also been incredibly useful for me in familiarizing myself with Columbus. Since I am originally from California and lived here about 5 months before the pandemic shut everything down, I have not been able to familiarize myself with Columbus and its different and varying neighborhoods/areas. Getting to the nitty gritty of the dividing lines of neighborhoods according to the City of Columbus has helped me locate the different streets and their significance within the city at-large. I created the Google map pictured below and seeing the boundaries demarcated by streets helped me as I located different neighborhood associations and more in this project.

I can’t wait to see what else I learn the next week, especially since a new hire for the Development Team is about to start. Learning about the Development Team needs these past six weeks has been an interesting ride and I hope to learn more with a new team member on board before the internship finishes.