Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

            Earlier this summer when I would drive to work I started stopping at a local UDF or Starbucks to get my morning coffee. When I would go to UDF the coffee was cheaper than Starbucks but instead of walking out with my coffee in a biodegradable container I would walk out with a single use polystyrene cup that would have a usage life of an hour. While at Starbucks I would get a biodegradable container that if composted would return to the soil in the form of organic matter.

            After watching the single use cups build up in the FLOW office I bit the buck and got a refillable travel coffee mug that is also recyclable. But still I wonder about the thousands of single use cups that are going to be thrown away each day.

My UDF refillable cup

            Whether your cup is Styrofoam or biodegradable it is likely destined to spend most of its life in a landfill. The plus of a biodegradable cup is that if it makes it out in the natural environment it will decay before it reaches one of the ocean’s garbage patches. Unless you personally compost your compostable food items it will do little to effect the filling in of landfills. This is the same for any other “disposable” item you can think of. A larger problem than coffee cups is trash bags. Plastic bags mostly end up in the trash, and are so lightweight that they escape to our water ways.

Photo from an Ocean Gyre

            Some local governments have taken action to fight plastic bags. In Washington DC, Montgomery County Maryland, many parts of California, and other sensitive areas have put a $.05 tax on a plastic bag, but have given you $.05 back if you use reusable grocery bags. Other countries have instilled similar measures to reduce the amount of plastic in both landfills and the environment. In china Styrofoam takeout has been banned and in Germany the manufacturers are required to collect it after use.

            In the book Cradle to Cradle by Michael Braungart and William McDonough the authors recommend that packaging and other single use items be designed with the end in mind. If you harken back to the stories of the milk man and deposits on glass bottles that were always refilled, then there is a blue print in place that some people even still remember.

            It will be hard to break our addiction to single use items, it really takes a personal commitment to eliminating the amount of these items that we use as they are in our everyday lives. But our local and county governments can help by placing the 5 cent tax on plastic bags, or by banning Styrofoam take out containers. It takes great awareness to try and buy things that our biodegradable and even more commitment to recycle and compost all that you can. Until government acts, use paper when you can and remember that travel mug for your coffee.

A lot of my work at the ALS Association finally started coming together at the end of last week. I started to receive calls back from durable medical equipment suppliers, who we plan to contract with to store the loan closet equipment. Currently, the issue at the loan closet has mainly been finding reliable storage, and historically the chapter has relied on donated space. I think at this point most places are moving towards paying for their space while receiving in kind services from the suppliers, such as new medical equipment or cleaning and repair for the existing equipment.

I was able to get a contract as a template from one of the other chapters in my first couple of weeks here, so now I’ve started to customize it to suit our needs. It’s been great to be able to contact other chapters in the organization who are doing similar work, since they’ve had valuable input and have been willing to share their resources. I think it’s one of the benefits of being part of a larger national organization, which is an experience I haven’t had before.

I also received code that I had requested from the software company that manages the software we use to organize equipment and customers. With it, the care services staff at the ALSA will be able to run a query to determine how often certain pieces of equipment are being used and when they were last checked out. This is vital because if we’re paying to store the equipment, we want to ensure that the equipment that we’re paying to store is being used and that we’re maximizing the space. Some staff members took some convincing for this step, but I think now that they’re able to see what the query does, they’ve realized how much work it will end up saving them in the long run. They’ll no longer have to move around and sort through equipment that they haven’t used and that customers don’t really need.

For the rest of this week and for the next week, I’ll be working on figuring out details and possibly finalizing a contract with our durable medical equipment suppliers. I can’t believe I only have two weeks left, but I’m proud of myself for staying on schedule and I’m glad that I’m starting to see all of my work pay off in a tangible way.

This past week was full of wrapping up my two large scale projects and spending more time with the club members! I finished all of the Summer Brain Gain evaluations and assessments! I am currently working on a detailed guide on how to administer the post-assessments at the end of the summer, which will take place after I leave. Two weeks ago I was able to present the initial successes of the summer brain gain program. After spending so much time on the program it was a great way to concisely explain the program! I am excited to see how the program continues to grow in the upcoming years. The summer has flown by! However, between the evaluations, work with the TANF (Temporary Assistance to Needy Families) grant, the college trips, the trips to different corporations, I have gotten a great idea of what the Boys and Girls Clubs focuses on.

This past week I was able to travel to the Nationwide Insurance building in downtown Columbus as part of another “Career Launch” workshop. The event was quite successful! All of the children really enjoyed their time there and the staff members that interviewed and spoke with the club members were insightful, funny, and thoughtful. I can tell they really enjoyed taking the time out of their day to help our members professionally develop. I also learned a lot about the company. One of our members wants to be a sound engineer, and was unsure if Nationwide hires sound engineers. When the question was asked, someone from Human Resources immediately jumped in and mentioned that she just hired two sound engineers to run their audio/visual equipment and in-house auditorium. One of the students wants to be a pilot, and apparently Nationwide employs pilots as well! Needless to say I was thoroughly impressed with the visit and it was just another layer of the Boys and Girls Clubs that I was able to experience! The last visit in the “Career Launch” program is on August 7th with Huntington Bank!

View from the top floor of Nationwide!

Nationwide Boardroom!

I had my firsts “extended” stay at the social security office this past week. I went with the case worker Ahmed Kamil and we were registering a family of seven for their social security numbers and cards. The line was long as usual, but when we got to the social security worker’s booth, that is when things became difficult. Ahmed told me there are a few people at the social security office that know CRIS well and can get them through the process quickly, but the lady who served us had never worked with CRIS and did not “specialize” in registering people for social security. It took her quite some time to type each family member’s personal information, and just as I thought we were wrapping up a problem arises. The lady pulls the application for one of the younger girls, a quizzical look of doubt crosses her face as she raises an eye brow and asks, “why is this girl’s mother and father different than the other children’s?”

Ahmed calmly replies, “This girl’s parents were deceased and the family cared for her in the camps since she was young”

The lady announces “I’m sorry you can’t register for her card unless her original parents gave official guardianship to this couple” as if her assessment of the situation was finite and clear to everybody in the room.

I was irate to say the least, but Ahmed keeps a level head and attempts to explain to the lady that such documents don’t exist in the camps, or in Africa at large really, but the lady would not budge. Eventually she spoke to her supervisor and everything was squared away, but only after a 3 1/2 hour ordeal. Ahmed told me they run into these types of problems all the time and the high turnover rate means it is hard to have consistency, but the ones who have worked there a while understand the barriers and obstacles CRIS’s case workers deal with and speed up the social security registration process for us.

I have been working extensively with another group of 3 single Somali males who are all rooming together to lower their rent. Their caseworker Dahir is worried about one of the younger Somali guys who doesn’t seem to understand life in America yet. Obviously he is not expected to have a full grasp on life in Columbus seeing he has only been in the US for two weeks, but his priorities are out of place. Dahir thinks he does not quite understand that not everything is given to him like it was in the camps, and the guy is more concerned with getting a gaming device to play FIFA soccer than he is securing a job or paying his rent. I guess it’s the first time I realized younger clients can get so caught up with getting to America they don’t always realize the life adjustments and priority adjustments they will face in their new reality.

Step 1. Secure a nutritious and delicious lunch for the kiddos, as well as dozens of volunteers and community partners to make the day run smoothly and enjoyable. Ronald McDonald is a popular invitee to have on the guest list.

Ronald McDonald with kids at Children’s Hunger Alliance 2014 Summer Field Day

Step 2. Establish a dance floor complete with a DJ who knows all of the youngsters’ favorite tunes. If your CEO shows up, they will be more than happy to impart their cultural wisdom on him or her, so said CEO should come prepared with comfortable foot wear.

Our CEO, Mary Lynn Foster being taught new moves.

Step 3. Mobilize rotation stations to keep the kids moving and grooving. Activities can include having them dress in stylish attire and run in circles, transport water using a sponge, or flashing their creativity with arts and crafts.

Step 4. Help them perfect their golf swing, their basketball shooting and their soccer dribbling. Some kids may be more skillful than yourself. This is normal. To avoid embarrassment, refrain from participating and feign an age-related injury that their young bodies cannot relate to. My personal favorite example is to smack my knee and say something along the lines of “this old knee, after all the miles and miles I’ve put on her, she just can’t take it anymore…”

Step 5. If you feel their energy is subsiding, introduce a little more competition. You can assign half the group to be predators (sharks are popular) and the other half as prey (minnows are the preferred snack of Selachimorpha) and watch the craziness ensue. If there is a relay of sorts happening, nothing charges kids up more than shouting “THIRTY SECONDS LEFT!!!” like you’re announcing the start of the apocalypse. Of course, this tactic is also effective when children are only competing again themselves, for instance in the number of sit-ups they can do.

Step 6. You want the kids to have a lasting impression of your afternoon, give them something to take home. Throwing buckets of water on them seems to be effective.

The kids insisted they didn’t get wet enough at the Wet ‘n Wild station.

If you completed all 6 steps, congratulations! You’ve now made 300 friends who will never forget you.

To be honest, I usually zone out when people start talking. It’s not on purpose, but for some reason if my subconscious senses a lecture coming on, it comes out to play and my conscious-conscious goes in to take a nap.

Looking back on our last Fellows Learning Session, that’s what I would have assumed would happen when Doug Kridler, the President and CEO of The Columbus Foundation, came to as a guest speaker. I was super surprised then when he got up to leave after having talked for nearly an hour and I realized I had listened the whole time.

I promise I’m not just looking for brownie points because he basically signs my paycheck; I’m serious when I say I really picked up some useful bits of knowledge from Mr. Kridler:

1. Slow down and people will listen to you! The way he spoke was conducive to me listening. His slow, calm speech contrasted strongly with my usual tongue-tied stammers at work.
2. Be skeptical, but not cynical. This resonated with me because there has been more than one ball drop or mis-communication this summer between my office and our community partners. I suppose if everyone is skeptical about something going smoothly, everyone would be checking and double checking and minimizing hitches.
3. A successful nonprofit is the one that is run like a business. Perhaps it’s common to think that NPO’s are or should be above private sector tactics for growth. Mr. Kridler talked about erasing the stigma around NPO’s using funds to promote themselves. He explained how promoting and growing an NPO is promoting the cause.
4. A good employee. I asked Mr. Kridler what makes an employee successful. People aren’t born as CEO’s. How do they get there, or anywhere they want to go? He described a successful employee as one who is rooted in the description of her/his job and who enjoys getting all of the details right, but who uses creativity to think beyond how things are to what things can be.

I found these four eclectic pieces of advice to be exceptionally relevant to my current life, and I plan to take them with me on all of my future endeavors.

Although blogging about our experiences over the summer is a mandatory component of the Columbus Foundation Fellows program, reading the blogs of the other fellows technically is not. However, I suspect that all of us have happily done so anyway. I find it both fascinating and encouraging to hear about the adventures of my colleagues at their respective institutions. I am proud to count myself among the 11 bright young professionals undertaking important and diverse work in the Columbus community.

While anyone can see that our individual jobs are quite different, I can’t help but trace similarities in the missions behind our work.  For example, out of the 11 fellows this summer, 6 of us are working with organizations the deal directly with issues caused by disadvantages regarding physical health. This realization made me recall a powerful quote from one of my favorite authors:

“It occurred to me that there was no difference between men, in intelligence or race, so profound as the difference between the sick and the well.”

This quote is not from a distinguished health professional or a prominent social activist; it’s from F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. That’s right! The quintessential novel of American decadence, glamour, and wealth actually has something pretty interesting to say about social disparities. Go figure.

Fitzgerald’s words remind us that it is often not simply laziness, stupidity, or poor luck that keeps a person from thriving; it’s navigating life in a body that is unwell. Of course, instruments of oppression such as limited access to medical care and insufficient education on personal health causes most of these problems in the first place, but the poor health that inevitably follows sinks people further into disadvantage and hopelessness.

That fact that over half of the summer fellows work with organizations that address health problems in the community tells us 2 things: (1.) we identify good health as a universal and crucial right, yet (2.) a significant percent of our community does not enjoy that basic right.

There will always be different and often contending opinions regarding if, when, and how society should provide assistance to those who are struggling, but we are getting to a point where the arguing is distracting attention away from the initial issues. The right to good health seems to be something we can all agree on, but debating and tearing down the ideas of others on how to make that right accessible to more people is wasting time or community clearly doesn’t have. We have identified this problem together, and now we need to collaborate, not debate, to figure out how to solve it together.

So far, one of the high lights of my time at the Foodbank is my interview with Matt Habash, the CEO of the Foodbank. The title of CEO can be elusive and give the impression of removal from the trenches, making decisions with little knowledge on what the daily activities are. I am proud to say that Matt is not one such CEO. He was there when the Foodbank began over 30 years ago packing emergency boxes, working with clients hands on, and since he has overseen all of the moves and changes the Foodbank has undergone.

As we sat down to talk, I expected to get maybe a half hour. After all, I am a very temporary addition to the staff and I had to go through his assistant to make an appointment for the meeting. I was told by Kerry, my supervisor, that you really only need to ask a couple of question and Matt will fill his answers to the brim with information. The conversation flowed as he went from how he started, to his political involvement, conversations with conservatives in the Cleveland grocery store industry, and his timeshare of a sustainable forest in Nova Scotia.

To my surprise we shared a common belief system and ideology. Our outlooks on the world were very symmetrical and complimentary and I was not expecting it. Matt would change topic in a quick but related fashion at the whim of where his mind took him. I got the impression that talking about his life’s work at the Foodbank was often requested of him but as soon as he got a couple minutes into the story, it merely served as a baseboard for conversations on any topic to crop up. One thing he said that I would keep in mind is that urban farms and community gardens are completely different enterprises with different purposes and outcomes. We often use these terms interchangeably for the only way they are alike; they produce some quantity of food outside of the usual Confinement operations and monoculture farms of the agri-food industry. Community gardens serve more of a purpose in forming community engagement and rubbing shoulders with your neighbors. It breeds accountability and ownership for the place you live as well as providing an educational and nutritional component. Urban farms are usually businesses or operate to produce for some end whether charitable or for commodity sales. This is not a take away that summarizes the entire conversation at all but it is interesting and it changed the way I used to see gardening on all of its different scales.

An hour and a half passed and he said, “Did I not get to any of your questions?” As he looked at my sheet of paper with printed lines of themes or topics I wanted to cover.

“No you answered everything and more.” I thanked him for spending so much time with me and came away from that with even more trust and faith in the mission and operations of the Foodbank.