This past week and a half I have really come to understand what people mean when they say you wear different hats when you do nonprofit work. It was the second week of our Summer Literacy camp, but the first week I was not around for half of the time. While I was gone, my supervisors and other employees at the office were taking care of any tasks related to the camp that I would have normally done. When I got back at the beginning of this week, I picked up those tasks and learned so much. The main responsibility I had was putting together lunches for the kids. If you had asked me at the beginning of the fellowship what I thought I would be doing, making lunch would not have been something I included on that list! Nonetheless, I did it, and had a pretty decent system going by the end of the week despite the challenges. I certainly appreciated my coworkers and supervisors so much more for being able to pick up the slack while I was away. While I think it can be difficult in nonprofit to have so many different people working on a single project, it is also incredibly beneficial. On one hand, this means that there are different work, communication, and problem solving styles that have to amalgamate into one. On the other hand, it is great to have fresh eyes and different perspectives when a project does need to get done. I really appreciated being able to talk to everyone in the office that had a hand in helping with the camp and hearing their experiences. The kids had such a good time and learned so much – we are hoping to continue hosting literacy camps in some capacity to help the kids as they go back to school or enter for the first time.

This past week, I was also able to help create our newsletter. This includes gathering information and photos, writing stories, and transferring everything into a Bloomerang template to send out to our subscribers. I am getting to learn new software and exercise a little bit of creativity too! In this newsletter, we are featuring a story about a women’s group one of our employees, Hamida, started. It was wonderful to get to talk to her and learn more about the group, why she started it, who the women are that attend, and what has come out of the group. I love learning about the various ways community grows at and in the surrounding neighborhood of the RIC.