This week will be my last week working with my wonderful interim executive director, shoutout Terri Gehr. Next week will be heavy with events as we will be busy welcoming our new executive director to the organization. However, this week I would say was more calm than my first two weeks (probably because we didn’t work Wednesday).

The week started with more planning for our 50th Anniversary Celebration. I was grateful to sit in our 50th Anniversary Committee meeting on Monday. It was really cool and interesting to see the behind the scenes and the details of what goes into preparing for an event of this magnitude. All these details that tend to be overlooked but can be crucial to the efficiency of the celebration. I am now leading a project relating to our 50th Anniversary that I am excited about. The first step of the project being outreach to see if it was something people would be interested in. I’ll save those details of the project for another week.

Along with that work, I also spent a lot of time working in our constituent database cleaning things up. We were so grateful to find out that a former Signature Program Grad gathered contact information and updated work information for every Signature Program Grad from 1974-2015. I don’t think words can stress how important and crucial this was for us to get this information. Most of our database, being our 50th year, does not updated information in regard to emails or work status. This makes it extremely difficult to contact former participants and try to reengage them. My work consisted of going through each year to see if we already had a profile for these people and if not we would need to make one so we can properly update their information.

I was also grateful enough to sit in on our Nonprofit Board Governance Training Program day. It was helpful for me to see so many familiar faces from Week 1 who were participating. Most of them I had met my first week at Signature Program Graduation. The idea behind this training is to educate people of what a nonprofit board does, what roles come into play, and how they should be acting while on the board. Most people who were in the training had no previous experience on a board but wanted to learn so they could be the most prepared to join a board. I took a lot out of my experience there, mostly because I didn’t know much about board governance in general. I am pleased to have met board members of Leadership Columbus in these 3 weeks, but I didn’t actually know much about what they do on our board. It was beneficial information for me to learn because know I can interact with our board members while knowing what their roles are and what they are trying to accomplish while serving on our board. I hope to use my experience from this day later in the future if I find myself wanting to get involved on a nonprofit board as well.

See you next week,

Austin