Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

This is a bittersweet moment, marking the end of my journey as a summer fellow. It’s hard to believe that ten weeks have already passed. I vividly remember the first week when all of us fellows were navigating through a sea of confusion (lol), having jumped at the opportunity without fully grasping what was ahead. But looking back, I’m certain none of us regrets that decision. It was a thoughtful one, at least for me; I had to deeply consider whether I wanted to dedicate my summer to this program.

Coming in, I had a different mindset. I thought that after taking my Pediatric nursing class, working with kids would be a breeze. And while it wasn’t necessarily difficult, it required authenticity; something that took me a few weeks to truly embrace. Did I enjoy my time with the kids? Absolutely. Hearing their reflections on kindness melted my heart, and I found joy in their growth.

Throughout this fellowship, I learned so much, not only from the children but also from the incredible staff members who taught me about the in and out of non-profits, shared their individual stories, and helped me discover more about myself. As this experience comes to a close, I want to say a huge thank you to the people influenced me in one way or the other, from Erin Scott who opened our eyes to social justice work from a systems perspective, to Doug Kridler who inspired us to dream big, to Nick Jones and Elizabeth Martinez that provided us with invaluable insights into leadership and navigating life’s complexities, to Toshia Safford, the eloquent President and CEO at the Center for Healthy Families, who discussed advocacy and the importance of fostering effective collaboration. And lastly, to Sonya Thesing who shared her expertise on the intricacies of fundraising. The wisdom these remarkable individuals imparted is something I wouldn’t have gained had I not embarked on this fellowship. I mean, one of my takeaways from all these discussions is if your dream don’t scare you, that means it isn’t big enough.

A special thanks goes to our amazing mentor, Dr. Lomax, who not only guided us to finish strong but also showed us the realities of the world and how to remain true to ourselves. He has an incredible ability to recognize each of our strengths and consistently reassured us of our value throughout the fellowship. Thank you for all you did this summer.

As I conclude this blog, I want to express my deepest appreciation to the entire Columbus Foundation, the Seeds of Caring team, and everyone who supported me throughout this journey. Your impact on my life is immeasurable, and I am deeply grateful.

And on that note, this is my final blog till God knows when.

Thank you for sticking with me until the very end.

Kanyin

Hi Everyone! With the Summer Fellowship ending today, I want to reflect on my accomplishments and lessons learned throughout my time at CRIS. I am extremely proud of my work this summer and everything I accomplished, but none of my efforts would have been possible without my amazing team. They always supported me, gave me constructive feedback, and gave me the space I needed to truly thrive, and I am incredibly lucky.

This summer, I gathered over $5,500 in grocery gift card donations from community members throughout Columbus. These gift card donations went directly to clients who faced food insecurity and needed extra support. I also delivered over 90 food pantry boxes to clients, so I helped provide hundreds of meals to our recently arrived refugee and immigrant populations. Along with that, I helped create a food security system through partnerships. You all have seen me write about a few of the partnerships, but I established one with Lutheran Social Services (LSS) for five dedicated food pantry boxes per week, I built a partnership with Ohio State University for a dry-food pallet delivery that stores around 9,700 servings of food, we are working on a $50,000 grant through the City of Columbus with the NNE Map Food Pantry, and we are working with the City to become a host-site in its Go, Lunch! Program. CRIS went from little to no food security system to a small, work-in-progress system that I could not be more proud of.

While at CRIS, I learned about volunteer outreach, fundraising individual donations, partnership outreach and relationship management, communication and collaboration in a larger team, and how nonprofits operate. Through our bi-weekly learning sessions at the Columbus Foundation, I discovered more about myself, how to be an effective leader, and how to leverage my power as an individual to bring about the change I want to see in the world. At these sessions, we also met local nonprofit leaders in the Columbus community to hear more about their journeys and get a glimpse into leadership in the nonprofit world. Without these experiences, this fellowship would have felt like a regular internship, and I speak for all the summer fellows when I say how glad I am to have the chance to participate in these learning sessions.

As I sign off for the final time, I want to thank Dr. Mark Lomax, Becca Sigal, and the entire Columbus Foundation for making this experience possible for us fellows. I also want to thank the whole team at CRIS for being an exceptional hostsite who allowed me to grow and be my best self throughout my ten weeks. I had a fantastic experience and could not be happier with my summer experience.

After a wonderful 10 weeks working with FLOW, I am approaching my last day. This summer has been incredibly transformative. One skill I’ve been focusing on this week is communication. I’ve grown significantly in my communication skills and in understanding what works best for me. With so many moving parts in the projects, it can sometimes be challenging to determine who to speak to first. Organizing what needs to be discussed in advance and trying to understand the big picture have helped me become more efficient in communicating. Improving skills such as communication has been one of the most valuable aspects of this experience and something I will carry into my future.

After this program, I will begin a full-time position in wildfire prevention with a similarly structured organization. Thanks to my time with FLOW, I feel significantly more prepared and excited for the work ahead! I will dearly miss the FLOW team and everything we’ve accomplished together.

I also want to extend a huge thank you to the Columbus Foundation. This program is valuable for so many reasons. Being able to complete this fellowship alongside peers with similar drives, hear from experienced professionals, discuss my own experiences, and receive feedback has been invaluable. Entering the professional world can be intimidating, but having a program that offers independence while providing advice when needed has been wonderful. While I’ve known I was interested in the non-profit field for a couple of years, I needed to learn more. This summer, I’ve learned about various organizations, current policies, fundraising strategies, and the rewarding stories that come with working in the non-profit sector. Interacting with The Columbus Foundation staff and discussing the non-profit field from multiple perspectives has been eye-opening. I know the lessons I’ve learned will contribute to my future decisions and goals. Thank you to my fellow peers and Dr. Lomax for such a wonderful experience!

Reflecting back on this summer, I think I can positively say that I’ve had the best experience of my life. A little context if you’re new here but I’m going into my senior year at OSU studying Logistics Management. I didn’t have too much of an idea what kind of work I’d be doing this summer with Leadership Columbus. By saying that, I knew that I’d be doing work surrounding the 50th Anniversary Celebration in September along with helping prepare for COLA in July. Other than that, I didn’t really know what the tasks/projects would look like. It was tough for me to go through with the fellowship knowing this because I was very skeptical of what my role would look like. What made it more difficult was that I had another opportunity to be an intern in a warehouse learning logistics. I had to choose between an internship that would give me valuable skills related to my major; or a fellowship where I’d be learning the in and outs of a non-profit organization, something I’ve always been intrigued with. Let me tell ya, I 100% made the right choice with Leadership Columbus this summer and here’s why.

I wasn’t expecting to walk out of here with the amount of knowledge, guidance, and connections that I’ve gotten while being with Leadership Columbus and the Columbus Foundation. I’ve always had some leadership qualities growing up but I was never good at stepping up or having that confidence to be a leader. I am so so grateful to have worked with Leadership Columbus and the Columbus Foundation this summer. It was exactly the boost and guidance that I needed to feel confident about going into my senior year. Being in an organization that strives to create better leaders, how could you expect me to not walk out of here at the end of the summer feeling like a better leader, I mean C’mon. I learned so much through our program days about my own personal growth and felt myself becoming my confident about my work or stepping up when needed. Even the work that I got to do in the office was still very enjoyable. I barely knew anything about non-profits walking in here so I thought everything my team assigned to me was interesting. I was just happy to be of help to be honest, I love helping others and I guess that’s why non-profits have always been really cool to me because of the work that is done.

All the different tasks that I’ve had this summer really let me broaden my skillset which I’m very grateful for. I’d much rather have a very wide skillset because who knows if I’ll still be in logistics in 10 years. Getting that experience this summer in a warehouse would’ve really helped me gain the skills I’d need if I continue to do that work, but would I have gone through this personal growth journey and feel the way I do now? My guess is probably not. I feel so much more comfortable and confident about my future having attained the skills, knowledge, and connections in the various industries around Columbus. I am so thankful for to Dr. Lomax and the Columbus Foundation for giving me this opportunity to do this work this summer, it truly opened my eyes to the possibilities I have in the future. I am also extremely grateful to everyone on my team at Leadership Columbus. They have welcomed me in and made me feel like a part of their family. They truly care for me and want me to succeed. They have pushed and guided me this summer to become the strong, confident leader I am now at the end of it. Also, a thank you to the Leadership Columbus community which includes our board members and past program participants for letting me connect with you and to be such a wonderful resource.

If you’ve made it this far in the blog, I really appreciate the support I’ve gotten this summer. I’m someone who can express what I want to say while writing it out than if I were to try to say all this out loud to someone. I wanted to take it seriously so I can look back at these blogs and watch how I grew over the course of these 10 weeks. So, for one last time because I don’t know when I’ll write a blog ever again, thanks for tuning in!

-Austin

This week is the end of my summer fellowship in partnership with City Year Columbus. Since it’s my final week the workload has lessened. The focus of this week has been working on my Pecha Kucha presentation for The Columbus Foundation and connecting with marketing professionals in various industries. The Pecha Kucha presentation will be shared with my peers and their corresponding host sites detailing our experience with our assigned nonprofits.

My presentation begins with what City Year is as an organization, transitions to my time spent there and finishes with a farewell. I have never heard of this style of presentation before but think it is an improvement from the traditional style where people quickly lose interest. The 20 slides I created include featured photos, a snapshot of my projects and City Year branded icons that weave together the story of my summer. While the content was the easiest part I struggled with the time limit of 20 seconds per slide. To help with the flow and stick to the time constraint I prepared note cards for each slide. My only concern is that my script is around 1400 words so I will have to speak at 219 words per minute which is much faster than I am used to.

I set up meetings to connect with contacts at AEP, Cardinal Health and COTA to discuss marketing. I met with COTA on Monday via Teams and got some insight into marketing in the public transportation sector. COTA’s marketing focuses on connecting people to places and giving them opportunities. I also noted the increased emphasis on sustainability that seems to be a trend among companies regardless of the industry they’re in. As we live in an increasingly politically world, I think people are recognizing the importance of sustainability and protecting the environment so I’m excited to see where that takes us.

My summer fellowship at City Year Columbus has been a great experience. I have learned so much from the connections I’ve made and the mentors I’ve had. I am grateful to have been selected for this opportunity. After this summer I truly believe in the work City Year does and the power of young people. My main takeaway has been the meaningful impact individuals can have on their community and I hope to continue to have one on mine.

Hi everyone!

I began the week by continuing to work on our annual report. I’m happy with the progress that I made with the design, which I will put below. I think it does a nice job of reinforcing the brand colors and goals. I kept most of the report in the Bridgeway blue color since that is the “umbrella” color of the organization. The additions of orange and green act as accent colors to the report. The orange color symbolizes the Academy, and the green symbolizes the therapy center. I hope by adding these colors, it communicates that these programs are equal parts of Bridgeway and that it helps people to primarily recognize Bridgeway by the blue color rather than the orange color that was used before the rebrand.

I also finished up the final posts to showcase our summer program. I posted pictures of our spirit week and made a recap reel of the moments throughout the week. I also helped Rachel begin to put together the giant portrait collage that students worked on during the first week of the summer programming. It felt like a full-circle moment, and I cannot believe that the summer went by so quickly. I can’t wait to see the collage displayed in the gymnatorium because I know that staff, visitors, and students will be so excited to see it too.

I also worked on editing photos that I took during various events and preparing them to be posted in the following weeks. I was excited to hear from Alyssa that people have been appreciating the posts that I have been working on throughout the summer. The Advancement team does an amazing job of fundraising for different programs at Bridgeway, but that means that there is often not enough time to go out and experience and create more content around those programs to share on social media. She told me that it was a huge help to have me there to share the stories and programming at Bridgeway because many of the amazing moments can go unseen. It felt nice to hear because sometimes I can be overly critical of my work, but it makes me happy knowing that it is appreciated by my team and is doing something to benefit the organization.

Happy Friday, everyone! It’s hard to believe that this program is almost over. It feels like just yesterday was my first day as a fellow! 

 As usual, I had an active week full of activities and projects. I started the week off preparing for Taste to Remember, organizing and gathering in-kind donations and donation requests as they come in the mail for the big event. It’s really touching to see the tremendous progress we have made in putting together an event of this scale, and I have gained so much insight from this opportunity. In-kind donations are considered non-cash gifts made to a nonprofit organization. These contributions can be made in various forms, like time, goods, services, or even materials to help with fundraisers for your organization from an individual or company. I’ve learned that when it comes to donation requests and in-kind donations, it’s essential to be willing to ask, stay connected, and, most importantly, stay organized.

The highlight of my week was being able to attend a few webinars about nonprofits to get a better understanding of nonprofit corporate giving and fundraising strategies. Through these webinars, I gained valuable insights about the significant work behind the scenes for fundraising and annual events. In the first webinar, I learned that there are several ways of corporate giving, like volunteer grants, community grants, and matching gifts. Also, there are several ways and strategies to motivate corporations to give, but what mostly comes down to the relationship between the nonprofit and corporate and the corporate self-interest. On Thursday, I attended the second webinar, which was vastly different from the first one as we had the opportunity to listen to the fantastic panel and were put in break-out rooms to discuss the topic more in-depth and ask questions. In this webinar, there was a lot of great information and advice about fundraising strategies and how technology has affected and improved. I also met some individuals from other organizations eager to share their knowledge and experience with me about fundraising. I was surprised to hear about the diversity of career opportunities available in fundraising.

One more week, and I have so many mixed feelings. It’s a combination of excitement, sadness, joy, and unrealness all rolled into one. I would have never imagined that I would be lucky enough to get this position, let alone learn and do so much in this short amount of time. 

Hello everyone! This week has been a busy and exciting week for me at CSB! 

This week I got the privilege of representing CSB by showing up to facilitate the scheduled interviews of our honorees for the 2024 Founder Awards Event. I got to work with Robyn Haines with NBC4; she was the interviewer for each of our honorees, and she was a pleasure to work with. On Tuesday, July 30th, I was scheduled to meet Sherrell Johnson, the CEO and president of Treats 4 the Streets. Treats 4 the Streets is a coalition who holds a weekly food service at the Downtown Metropolitan Library serving restaurant quality foods, baked goods, essential hygiene products, Narcan, and health check-ups from a physician to unhoused individuals. Being there and observing the warm and genuine aura of Sherrell Johnson, I was more than confident in CSB’s decision to recognize her with the Bob Lazarus Unsung Hero Award. I was also grateful for the experience because the people in need of services were treated as family and it was refreshing to see a group of people who care to help and do not see people for their situation, but as human beings. 

On Wednesday, July 31st I met with Timothy Miller at the Crane Group office for his scheduled NBC4 interview, and it was interesting gaining insight from someone who was on the Community Shelter Board’s Board of Trustees for 24 years. He had a lot of educated takes on the state of homelessness and what initiatives Columbus can take to tackle this issue.

Lastly, on Thursday August 1st, I met with Nathan Smith at one of the hotels he’s used to temporarily house residents of Colonial Village who lost their homes due to administrational negligence and substandard living conditions. Nathan was very humble and down to earth; he and his team took up the initiative to rehouse the residents from Colonial Village and have successfully rehoused over 1,300 residents. His work is truly centered around his personal passion for helping others and sitting in on his interview was truly inspirational. 

I had a great week and I’m grateful my supervisor, Sara, trusted me with taking this on. 

Hi everyone! Sad to say goodbye to such a remarkable experience. This week was my last at the Mid-Ohio Regional Planning Commission. My time at MORPC has been a tremendous experience, which I will cherish for the rest of my career. This week, I got to end with a few very amazing opportunities and events. Specifically, I believe that my work with using GIS and helping develop their green infrastructure toolkit was an amazing opportunity to network with members of the community.

In this opportunity, I was able to spend my last few weeks going around Central Ohio to different communities and highlighting their green infrastructure initiatives. As someone who wants to work for the federal government, I believe this helped me get a good local perspective of how these agendas from the top actually make it local governments effectively. Implementation is a major issue for programs, so I absolutely loved being able to see the progress and tips that these communities offered. As I continue to advocate at various levels of government, I will surely take into account these incredible experiences and the different perspectives and voices that I heard along these last two weeks.

In another light, I was able to finish my work across the office, finishing a passion project of mine as I got to do a deep dive into a public policy development that would reauthorize the Economic Development Administration. As someone who is currently looking at congressional or EDA roles in the future, it was a match made in heaven when I was allowed to work on memos concerning this bill. Without a doubt, I am so happy that I got to do this work, so I am thankful once again to MORPC for allowing me to work on various subjects.

It will be a sad goodbye, but I can positively say that MORPC and their staff have been rock stars throughout this summer. I will truly miss the great people I met throughout my time there.

Hi everyone! It’s crazy that this program is almost over. Week by week you get even more comfortable with your host site as you have more conversations and are brought in on more projects. It truly feels like I’m a part of the team, we have team discussions on future events and someone will say “Oh Kennedy can do this or be a part of this” until they realize I will be gone by then. The team at The Women’s Fund has been incredibly welcoming and has let me know how the organization runs and what future plans are. The conversations about career trajectory and nonprofits and personal conversations about family, friends, pop culture, and politics were so meaningful. Through these 10 weeks, I’ve truly gotten to know the team and collaborated on projects throughout the programs.

At this point, I am making sure all my projects are done or at a place for someone to pick them up. The Donor Survey is completed and is ready to be sent out for the date they have planned. StoryCorps rollout on social media is happening next week. My main projects have come to a close as the program is. This week had an overwhelming theme of weirdness. It feels weird for the program to be ending. It feels weird to be a post-grad. It just feels so odd to not be in school and now looking for full-time job opportunities. As a student, you often think about this time in life, but it feels weird to be living it. I’m extremely grateful for the opportunities I’ve had and will continue to have. Life is truly a journey that I take on day by day. Taking things day by day has reconstructed my thinking to not put time limits on everything. I am an extreme planner who likes to put deadlines on everything. Taking one step at a time relieves the pressure of needing an answer.

This program has affirmed my want to work in the non-profit space and changed the way I approach various opportunities that further my career. I have been challenged to think about my “why”, which has clarified a series of unknowns for myself.

Hope everyone had a great week

See y’all in the next one!

Kennedy Smith