Hi! My name is Kenzie LeBrun. I just graduated from Wheaton College in IL with a BA in psychology. I have the privilege of working with Green Columbus this summer. I am currently one of their two hired employees. I would love to work with nonprofits in some capacity beyond this summer, and being one of two people working gives me a lot of hands-on experience of what working in all aspects of a nonprofit entail.

Shelly Douglas is Green Columbus executive director, and was a Columbus Fellow herself two years ago. I have spent this week with Shelly, learning about the organization, and doing a couple of outings. We went to the FACCES summer event Wednesday evening. We had a table set up and talked to people to try to get some volunteers out to their greenhouse (every first and third Thursday if you are interested). Friday we visited a park to get the lay of the land because we are teaching some students at the park next week. We also spent some time Friday in one of our two tree nurseries.

Green Columbus is an environmental nonprofit that has two big events they do each year. They organize the big Earth Day Columbus events. This last year over 160 sites were organized where people picked up litter and planted trees. The other big event is the big tree giveaway in October. In their tree nurseries, they have about 3,000 trees that are growing to be given away for free to the people of Columbus. This event is what I will be spending most of my time preparing for. Unfortunately, we had about 1,000 trees that did not start growing. They are just sticks in a pot, so we had to pull them out. Saturday morning we are having an emergency tree replanting, where our volunteers will be planting some new baby trees that will hopefully grow and be ready for the giveaway in October.

Each day is different than the last. I am not a routine person, so the variety of my day to day is exciting and right up my alley. Besides removing dead trees, a lot of my work so far has entailed data gathering. I have created and sent out surveys to 3,000 people so Green Columbus can track their trees and gather information on how the Earth Day events went. I am very excited to see where my internship takes me next, I currently have 70 baby trees in my basement, you never know what will happen at Green Columbus.

www.greencbus.org | www.earthdaycolumbus.org