Hello Everyone!

I completed my third week at Flow and am continuing to enjoy it so much! Last week, I spent much of my time outside with volunteers from STANTEC, an engineering firm. It was their week in the community so they scheduled multiple events with us around our different sites. Even with the extreme heat, the volunteers did an incredible job and made lots of progress at our sites. The heat has shown to be a problem for many of our plants especially our newly planted trees. Volunteers dedicated so much time to helping us out all across the city to ensure the plants were safe from the weather. It has been wonderful to meet so many passionate individuals all from different areas coming together to help. In addition to meeting so many great people at these events, I have learned a lot of volunteer management and organization. It is difficult to plan out which locations need to most help and when this is best. With the assistance of the FLOW Ameri Corps member, Maggie, I have learned the best way to do so and how to do it in an effective way.

In addition to the community events, I spent much of my week working on my main project, The 2024 Tree Giveaway. This week I began contacting local schools, churches, business, etc. in order to begin finding permanent locations for our 1800 trees. I have not done cold calls before this and was nervous to start this process, however it has gone very well so far! I am looking forward to continuing to make connections and begin making significant progress on the project.

Also this morning, we have a new member of the FLOW team starting! We are mostly volunteer based so it is very exciting to have a new permanent person to work with. I am looking forward to the upcoming week and continuing to learn about the Columbus environment and community.