Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

The third week of this fellowship was the first week of camp for the summer.  We started off the summer with the older kids in our Teen  Workshops.  There were two camps in the morning, Mighty Metals and Cartooning 101, and one camp in the afternoon, Muppet Mania.  Our teens LOVED these classes…and so did I!

In Mighty Metals class, our teacher and students clipped, snipped, cut, and bent wire, cans, sheet metal, and odd metal bits into robots, mobiles, jewelry, and more.  One of our students even entered her robot in the art show at the State Fair!

In Cartooning 101, original comics were invented and drawn, and students took inspiration from the classics, like some of my favorites, Calvin and Hobbes and Samurai Jack. One student wrote an amazing original comic about dinosaurs on an epic adventure – I smell a best-seller!

The last class of the day, Muppet Mania, was my personal favorite, and the class I spent the most time with.  During the morning classes, I mostly did other tasks, like checking emails, finding library books to stock our reading corner with topical books for each week and project, pulling supplies for the following week, and working on fine-tuning my own lessons.  But for Muppet Mania, I knew that an extra set of hands would be helpful in the classroom for this complicated project (and I really just wanted to make a Muppet)!  The campers did a great job, and I was so amazed at the professional looking results.  Surprisingly, Muppets are fairly easy to make, and the supplies are really inexpensive!  With some chipboard, felt, foam rubber, hot glue, fake fur, and two ping-pong balls, anyone can make their own personal, original puppet.  I made a hedgehog puppet, using my pet hedgehog (Huck) as a model, and even brought Huck in for a special treat on the last day of camp to show him off to the kids 🙂

Look at this fabulous Muppet and his stylish wardrobe! According to his creator, despite the teeth, he is a nice lake monster/goblin, not a scary one.

Works in Progress – It takes A LOT of foam and fake fur to make these creations!

Working with teens is a lot of fun, because they tend to be a little quieter and a little more self-directed than the younger kids.  But I love working with kids of all ages and helping them cultivate their love for art, so I’m really excited for week 4 – the first week of Young Master’s camp!

My first year social work practicum was at Mount Carmel East, and I learned more there than I can summarize easily.  I knew that I’d picked the right career choice when I started to miss working in a clinic on the days when I was in class.  I’ll be 29 next month, and full time work and adulthood aren’t all that new to me anymore, but missing my work was.  For most of my twenties I slogged through customer service work and call center jobs in an effort to become financially stable after my surgeries.  I came to grad school intent on a career in advocacy, and eight months of working directly with patients changed my mind.

Clinics, needless to say, are my favorite part of my time with the ALSA.  I’m learning a lot during the lengthier amount of time I spend doing administrative work and program design – they’re skills I’ve had to utilize less – but Fridays connecting with patients reminds me of why I was drawn to social work and public health as a career choice in the first place.  It’s the space between duty and passion.

One of the things I’m fond of saying when people ask me about my spinal cord injury is that I will never be thankful for what happened to me, but I will always be thankful for the perspective it gave me on working with others.  When my ALS patients are frustrated by taking a little while to get out of their wheelchairs or write out something they used to be able to say, they might snap at me, and I don’t take it personally because I get it.  Sometimes that’s the key to forging a bond with patients (or just the key to staying positive during the work day.)

It’s fun, though.  I’ve gotten to help the social worker at the clinic and redesign some of their forms, and being at the clinic really helps me to get some extra perspective on the needs for the program I’m redesigning.  ALS is relatively rare, and it means that some of our patients from rural or Appalachian regions drive literally three to five hours, round trip, to be seen by the clinic or to pick up equipment.  As a city boy, it’s something I can’t really fathom, and it’s something I’ve tried to be mindful of while reworking the program.  The ALSA liked my suggestion to create a new location in southeast Ohio so that our Appalachian patients won’t have to drive as far, and it could be the difference for many of them between a three hour drive and a one hour drive.  It’s a small thing, but sometimes those are the things that make patients feel the most cared about, and that do the most to ease the burden of disease.

The ABCs of networking: amateur espionage, baseball, and coffee tables.

This third week of my dynamic fellowship I began to step out of my Homeport daily work and into the wide world of non-profit volunteer programs across Columbus.  Out in this new, wide world I was schooled in the art of networking and making connections.  After completing the first leg of my SOP project I began my week with some amateur espionage (I know this is more of an E word than an A word, but it’s called the ABCs not the EBCs, so Amateur espionage it is).  I began my task of going undercover at other organizations’ volunteer orientations to research best practices that we can potentially implement at Homeport.  I attended a volunteer orientation at Dress for Success Columbus, a non-profit that provides appropriate work attire and career counseling for women entering the job force.   Experiencing orientation from a participant’s perspective allowed me to get a feel for what we need to provide for our own volunteers.  After getting a tour of their location and received a short orientation to the different volunteer opportunities I had the opportunity to sit down with their volunteer coordinator to learn the benefits they have seen from doing a monthly volunteer orientation the way they do and where they have found the need for change in their own volunteer engagement.  More importantly I made a valuable connection in the industry who was willing to be a colleague and important resource.

The next step in my networking crash course in Columbus non-profits was a fun one.  Baseball! With my fellow summer fellows I attended a Clippers game and got to spend an evening socializing and getting a break from the world of work.  We had an awesome time as we learned more about each other and continued to make connections.

After amateur espionage and baseball I was introduced to the most essential leg of my volunteer programming education, coffee tables.  On Thursday my boss brought me to a meeting with the Volunteer Administrators Network, of which she is a member and officer.  Not only did I get to meet several other volunteer coordinators from other Columbus-area non-profits, but I got to learn how to make coffee tables in the process.  This VAN meeting was   unique as it was their annual volunteer day for the members to practice what they preach.  We spent the morning volunteering at the Furniture bank where we learned how to construct coffee tables and end tables.

Volunteer administrators learning to construct coffee tables

It was a very valuable day for me to see another example of volunteer orientation and to make connections while constructing coffee tables.  It was a great week and a great precursor to the Networking session next week at the Columbus Foundation.

My NPO feeds hungry kids, but what these children are really starved for is affection. As I guide a new volunteer to the playground of one of our summer feeding sites, a mass of young girls with heads covered in tight Somali hijabs crowd around us, two complete strangers, pushing for hugs. They take turns, hugging us two at a time, and some of them sneak to our sides and slip their little hands in ours.

I want to stay and play and give them all of the love and attention they need and deserve, but my brain is already ticking. I have to get back, I have to send that email, I need to make that chart, did I get that answer yet? I have to get back.

I can juggle. Hacky saks, that is. Everything else is a struggle to keep in the air, and I’m sad to report that more than one thing slips through my hands and hits the floor. I feel like I’m getting a crash course in adulthood, and I’m afraid I’m not very good at it yet. I have a million things to do, but at any given moment, I’m only aware of three or four of them. All of my tasks circulate on convention currents in the core of my mind. A few rise to the top and I work hurriedly to complete them, but as I do, new tasks rise and what I was working on in one moment falls back to the bottom in another.

I’ve never worked full-time before, and my three weeks at Children’s Hunger Alliance have been a real struggle, constantly “fighting fire,” as my boss calls it. I’m trying the best I can, and I hope this scrimmage makes me better. I don’t want to fall short when the real season comes!

The longer I spend at the food bank, the more difficult it is to tell someone what I do here. People look for a title or a sentence that touches on your tasks daily but I don’t have that. I find it frustrating only so far as I feel people wont understand all it is that I do and how strange a position of 10 weeks is for a huge organization like the food bank. Within the last week, I performed a vast array of “tasks” and what those are could change weekly. I went on site visits to produce markets, some of which performed better than others. We decided on a date, time, and general schedule for a food insecurity workshop I am heading up in August. I surveyed clients about what services they would like information on at the produce markets, worked in our on site pantry, and facilitated/supervised garden volunteer shifts all week as well. I challenge you to keep that job description short, sweet, and to the point.

To go into more detail, one of the produce markets we went to last week was at Redeemer Lutheran Services. This oddly enough is Jill’s church and we saw each other at the market! At our table with information on how to apply for SNAP benefits and medicare/medicaid the line of people waiting for their produce would approach, gather, or stare at a distance at what we had to offer. For the most part people were interested in sharing their experience with such services. The overwhelming majority lamented their long waits on phone calls, for some sort of response to their applications, extended deadlines from overwhelmed public service workers, and general lack of communication and knowledge about what all of this means. It is like having to do your taxes alone every time some aspect of the process is changed. “You do qualify if you have this but not if you already received that”… “Do you live with anyone? oh they don’t count, they aren’t your immediate family”…It will cover this but you need to hear back about your application first”. The ifs, and, buts, only’s, and sometimes would drive insane but there is no other option, no other avenue to pursue. 

On a somewhat related note, one of my bigger projects for the summer is putting on a food insecurity workshop for the people and organizations involved in our garden and in other communities around Columbus. The goal is to discuss food insecurity, using gardening and farming as a platform for community interaction and cohesion. The garden is a great foundation to instigate education and advocacy for food insecurity because it brings people to the same level of importance. No one is doing any task more or less useful when working in a garden and it is a landscape that all experience in different ways but still, all have access. The hope is that this discussion will spur thought into what individuals and groups can do in their respective communities and circles to advocate, alleviate, or spread the knowledge of what it means to be food insecure, its history/origins, and consequences. We know that some will walk away from the workshop and perform like worker bees, spreading and proliferating the message from one bed to another and others will provide the support like water or sunlight. Any job or involvement is helpful and we hope to sprout a couple seeds of initiative and involvement through out the Columbus area.

I now find myself making metaphorical parallels to gardening as I think of ways to explain my job. I tend to many beds and plots. Some need more attention than others depending on the weather the past week, the stage of their growth and maturity. I water, I prune, I harvest, I plant. Sometimes I pollinate. Either way, in the garden, everyone involved is on the same level. We have a common baseline and we all learn by trial and error. I am pretty sure we have a 6 ft tall weed in one of the beds we never pulled out in hopes that it is a sunflower. I am still not sure if it will be one or not but it looks like something out of Jurassic Park in the midst of the delicate carrot tops.  I observe and take note of its progress I every time I walk through the garden because whether it turns into a sunflower or not, it is growing at a very fast rate in a very short amount of time.

Every day at my job is different and I love it! I spent the beginning of the week observing Summer Brain Gain activities. The club members have really taken a liking to the activities!

One of the Boys and Girls Clubs of America’s national programs is “Diplomas to Degrees”, a college readiness program. In an effort to expose several members to various colleges in Ohio, I accompanied 15 members from the Milo-Grogran site to Central State University in Dayton, OH. Since my future career involves college readiness, access, and admissions counseling, I was quite excited! The members had to speak with current students and ask them about their experiences in college. On the ride back to Columbus we had a great conversation about different colleges and their campuses! Next month we will travel to Cleveland State University and The Ohio State University, my alma mater!

I spent Thursday with the teens from the Weinland Park Site and facilitated their Brain Gain activity which focused on public speaking. On Monday, the students were required to watch several videos related to sales pitches. They learned how to give constructive feedback when hearing ideas. On Thursday we took it a step further! Members actually gave their own sales pitches, in the form of an elevator pitch and critiqued each other. I began by explaining what an elevator pitch was and gave one promoting Ohio State. In 60 seconds I had to tell them the 5,768,00,000 reasons why they should apply to Ohio State! The students then gave me great feedback and partnered with one another to practice and develop their own elevator pitches about their favorite college, career, sport, or invention. We had a variety of pitches and I truly believe the members learned a lot about public speaking! It is important young people practice public speaking before they have to present a project in college or for an interview!

Central State’s Clock Tower

On Thursday, I was fortunate to attend the monthly Board of Directors meeting for the Boys and Girls Clubs of Columbus. Hearing such accomplished individuals talk about ways to improve the community and the work of the Boys and Girls Clubs of Columbus was inspirational! My undergraduate specialization in the John Glenn School of Public Affairs was in nonprofit management, and we learned all about board compositions, mission driven organizations, and how to effectively engage the board. Actually seeing the board discuss issues and their relevancy to the mission of the organization complemented my classroom coursework. They literally think about their mission to reach the kids who need them most, before they make any major decisions! I won’t go into too much detail, but their are many exciting project in the works for the organization and I can’t wait to see where the organization is headed in the future!

Tune in next week to hear more about the Summer Brain Gain program and the grant project I have been working on!

At the start of this week I was able to visit the Dominion middle school rain garden and nursery and speak with its founder Marsha Bracken. The Rain garden is not yet two years old and already looks pretty mature and currently has butterfly weed in full bloom.

This rain garden is located at the entrance of the school’s parking lot and was previously just a curb island covered in grass.  Planted and modified this rain garden now filters rain water, serves as habitat, and is a much more pleasing sight to be had.

This picture shows the intake from the parking lot. As you can see sediment has drained from the parking lot into the artificial rip rap. The rip rap helps to break the flow of the water and slows it down. If not for this piece of green infrastructure all that sediment would stay suspended in the water and would add to the already murky state of the Olentangy and Scioto rivers.

In this picture you can see a species of Coneflower and other blooming natives in the background. These native species work to slowly filter the water back into the ground and also help filter the nutrients that could otherwise lead to algal blooms in a larger body of water. This also helps sort out other petroleum based sediments from the parking lot.

This Butterfly weed, a member of the milkweed family will be visited by pollinators and will also host the larva of butterflies such as the Queen or the Monarch.

Ms. Bracken also established a nursery behind the school in which her students start seeds taken from the rain garden, start them indoors and then plant them behind the school. This she hopes can be used for starting other rain gardens in the area while also aiding in her in the classroom as an educational project.