Hello! Week seven here at Legal Aid has been a great one with a lot of new projects starting up, along with old ones kicking into gear, both balanced with some fun. As I talked about before, I have been involved in creating what we’ve been calling our “Story Bank,” an easily accessible database of great and compelling client stories that could be used for a wide variety of purposes. I’ve been working a lot on it this week, and I am happy to say it is really coming along. Hopefully this will be a good resource long after I am gone.

Besides this, I’ve also been continuing in our preparation for the celebration of the Ohio Poverty Law Center’s anniversary party fundraiser. For those unaware, OPLC is Legal Aid’s advocacy affiliate that seeks to promote and work for the interests of those in poverty in Ohio policymaking. This upcoming event is very important, as raising funds for OPLC is critical for its work. While the event will occur over a month after I am done at Legal Aid, I am very grateful for the opportunity to help in its preparation and support.

Finally, I will soon be starting on assisting the Development team in applying for a massive federal grant, one that will take a lot of collaboration, ingenuity, and hard work to put forth an application for. On my end, I will be helping collect and sort through the immense amount of data the Supreme Court of Ohio provides on evictions in our service area (36 counties), hopefully providing some useful information that will assist in our final application. I’ve learned here that applying for federal grants such as this entail a lot of hours and hard work (estimated 120 hours of work!)—however, it is work like this that keeps Legal Aid going. I am excited to get more into this next week, hopefully sharpening my research skills in the process.