Hello! With Week 9 almost over, my time here at Legal Aid is almost to a close. This week, I have started to wrap up a few projects to prepare for the end of the summer and my time at Legal Aid, along with helping out with some grants and ongoing work. Early in the week, I continued in assisting research for an upcoming federal grant. As I stated before, this grant, one which would massively increase our eviction-work funding if won, requires a wealth of data that we have not previously used, looked for, or even were sure existed.

So far, we have hit a lot of roadblocks in our research, but after a lot of work we have started to chip through and find some of the necessary data. Researching and working with other Ohio nonprofits in search of this data has caused me to reflect on the importance of interorganizational outreach in the nonprofit world, as, when multiple groups are seeking the same mission, it can be critical to work together and share information.

Besides this research, we have been preparing for an upcoming fundraiser for the Ohio Poverty Law Center’s 15^th Anniversary. It is an important event, as fundraising for the Ohio Poverty Law Center, a political advocacy organization, has its own separate challenges than fundraising for the rest of Legal Aid. Furthermore, the communications team, in collaboration with some attorneys interested in getting good client stories out to the public, has been trying to set a more regular and guided process for collecting, writing, and putting out stories of Legal Aid impacting peoples’ lives. I have been able to directly help in this process, including doing some client interviews to test out some new story writing methods. All in all, it was a good week, and I am sad my time at Legal Aid is coming to an end.