Hi Everyone! My seventh week at CRIS brought tough setbacks, but relief came with some surprise breakthroughs at the end of the week.

On Tuesday, one of the food pantry partnerships I had in the works fell through — their paperwork requirements proved too challenging to overcome, so despite the best intentions on both sides, we realized the partnership would not be feasible. Partnership building takes time as you wait for responses, schedule and reschedule meetings, and design logistics. It’s a harsh feeling when you get so far in the process with another organization, and it’s only at the end, when everything is set up, that you realize the partnership won’t work. Setbacks like this extinguish the initial excitement rush gained from the prospective collaboration, but that’s how partnership building can go.

Thankfully, my luck swung back the other way with two great meetings with prospective partners. I moved forward on a collaboration with Ohio State to receive a dry-food pallet from its staple “Feed the Funnel” food packaging event in September. The pallet will deliver just under 9,000 servings of food, which will be excellent supplements to add to our food pantry boxes so they last longer. Also, we met with the NNE Map food pantry to discuss partnering on a $50,000 grant application through the City of Columbus’s Flourish grant program for Elevate! 2.0 organizations. These two opportunities and our partnership with Lutheran Social Services have drastically improved our food security system, and I have loved the partnership-building experience and building this system. As always, things can change, and I am prepared to pivot if necessary, but I am ecstatic with where things have gone this summer. I cannot believe that only three weeks remain in the fellowship program, but there’s more work left to do, and I look forward to what my final weeks have in store.