This week I have begun to feel very comfortable in my role. I feel like I have a good relationship with all of my coworkers as well as the families and kids that come to the office for programs and services. I feel well acquainted enough with the organization at this point to be able to jump in on various tasks and projects between my larger responsibilities. This week has been fairly slow around the office because Eid al-Adha, one of the holiest holidays in Islam, was this week. Eid Mubarak to all the friends who celebrate! While many families were out enjoying picnics and time with family, I was condensing and cleaning out our donor and volunteer database! However, I am happy to do this – I know it helps my supervisors and improves the efficiency and effectiveness of our organization. It has been helpful to learn that the small, mundane tasks allow the bigger, more exciting things to come to fruition, and staying on top of these responsibilities ensures the health of the organization and its ability to provide crucial services.

I learned two interesting things about grants this week. First, some have time constraints within which the organization has to spend the funds. Right now, we are trying to catch up spending for maintenance and improvements. This means I got to do a lot of online shopping today, which I am very good at so this is the perfect task for me. Second, I learned that the guidelines an organization must adhere to when applying for a grant are often far more strict that you would think. This is especially true for small organizations. We were recently trying to decide whether to stretch ourselves a little bit in order to fit a grant’s requirements or wait until next year when we have more capacity to actually fill the grant requirements. Stretching ourselves would have likely involved developing a whole new program to submit for funding, and hiring and entirely new person to run this program. I enjoy engaging in these kinds of cost-benefit analyses and seeing how each organization may do this differently and how important various factors are to the evaluation.

Our summer reading program is nearing its end. While this is sad, and will mean a lot less quality time spent with all the kids we have come to love so much, it is also exciting! It means another successful year of summer reading under the RIC’s belt and one of my first big accomplishments as a recent college graduate. It also means we are close to the ice cream party meant to celebrate the end of summer reading! The kids can’t stop talking about it and, honestly, I can’t either!