Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

We completed the pea teepees and did great work on our herb garden. Currently corn, cucumbers, and squash are germinating and we have successfully on-boarded AmSpirit as a partner in the garden as well! The concept of food-banking may seem strait forward. You store food to give to those who need it. However, at the food bank we are continually redefining what it means to have “need” and instilling in our volunteers and staff that no need is put above another persons, even if they need less than another. This may seem unjust but think about it this way. How complicated would it be to try to service only the people in chronic poverty and hunger versus just episodic? How could you even go about defining who fits into which category of need and then adjusting their priority to be fed accordingly? So we avoid this conundrum and in my opinion justly categorize any form and severity of need as the same need across the board.

The above photo is of a tomato plant and a drip line for irrigation. These hoses are porous so they spray a mist when water runs through them and we have the nozzle on a solar powered timer to let water through early in the morning, the afternoon, and later at night on the days that we do not have a garden shift.

Just to give an idea of literally our mission is realized. Our garden produce gets weighed and goes directly into the pantry where our clients shop, just 10 yards away. Sometimes clients even pick the veggies from the vine as they enter or leave the pantry.

I attached garden yarn to our gazebo with a staple gun so that the morning glory vine can crawl up the side and form a natural wall of greenery. This is just an artsy shot of a bench inside the gazebo and vine beginning its ascent.

This is our onion bed with three different varieties of onions. You have to wait until the green shoots almost look like they are dead before you can harvest the onion bulb from the earth.

These are our pea teepees for the pole pea plants to climb up. A mother and her daughter volunteered the other day and this is what we did together.

One of my responsibilities at the Mid Ohio Food Bank is running the volunteer hours at the Community Garden here on-site. Last week we harvested 18 pounds of lettuce and 3 pounds of radishes that went directly into the Kroger food pantry while our clients were shopping. They probably had the best looking and freshest produce to choose from. This week we will be harvesting the rest of the radishes and lettuce as well as making pea teepees and cleaning up our herb garden. So far our organizational and corporate sponsors that take care of their own plot and help out with some of our beds are Lane Bryant and the Lions Club. We are to have two more partners very soon!

I also work closely with our onsite pantry where clients can come in and shop for themselves and/or their family. Today I conducted surveys that will better inform us of our clients needs and allow them to give us feedback on what they want as far as a pantry experience goes and what other resources we should offer information about. At the food bank, every step of our work we ask the question, “how does this affect the client?” and this survey is facilitating us to better understand what that question means and how our answers can be better informed by the voices of the client themselves. Currently our survey is only in English so I am working on a translation to Spanish for the clients who are Hispanic/Latino. This will allow us to encompass a large demographic that is excluded from English only surveying. Another interesting and quite amazing thing about our pantry is that many times clients will come in as volunteers as well or help stock the pantry while they are waiting. We had a woman today helping us sort through pints of strawberries to through away the bad ones and consolidate the good ones. She was the fastest worker out of all of us doing the same job.

I am learning a lot and I cannot wait to learn more!

Resettlement is an entirely different world than my experience in the basic employability department of CRIS last summer. The two departments are only separated by a single staircase, but their interaction with each other might as well put them in separate countries. The idea of an office in resettlement is really just a place to store your supplies, computer and to meet with clients. For the caseworkers, the majority of the work day is spent driving around Columbus taking refugee clients to appointments, and gathering the necessary home supplies for airport arrivals. As the intern, I was responsible for buying the home supplies for the day’s afternoon arrival. The list consisted of necessities designed to give refugee clients a starting kit for living in America. My Big Lots shopping cart was filled with everything from bed sheets, cooking ware, and lamps, to shampoo, cleaning supplies, and toiletries all bought to ease the transition into American living standards and society. This week I experienced my first airport pickup. It was hard to imagine the emotions running through the minds of the people being picked up; Leaving your home forever, boarding a plane for the first time and travelling to a country they know little about and located in a cultural context foreign to most of them. They come from all over the world: Bhutan, Nepal, Somalia, Eritrea, the Congo, Burma, and Kenya to name a few, and they come either by choice or necessity seeking the safety and stability afforded by Western society. For the case workers, the airport pick up was business as usual. Many of the case workers have multiple pickups a week meaning multiple repetitions of purchasing home supplies, ordering mattresses, finding apartments, helping people settle in to their new homes, taking them to the grocery store, and applying for benefits at the county office, all daunting tasks needing to be finished within a 40 hour work week. Most of the case workers have 5 to 10 cases at one time, but Jhuma the Nepali/Bhutanese caseworker, has up to 30 cases at once! I am beginning to realize the amount of time this job consumes and how much it cuts into the personal lives of the case workers who often arrive at work around 9 and may not get home until 10 or 11 at night. But the airport arrival is the renewing and energizing force for the case workers. As the caseworker Dahir Aden told me, “the airport pickup is what makes this job worth it.” Seeing families united after years of forced separation by powers and forces they could not control, and the emotions of reuniting in a country offering a fresh start and new opportunities, I can see why the caseworkers continue to devote their precious time to their clients. .

This summer, I basically have the coolest job ever.  I get to make art, play with kids at summer camp, and learn what it takes for a non-profit museum to operate and function successfully in Columbus – what could be better?

My name is Marly Coldiron, and I am a graduate student working toward my Master’s degree in Arts Policy and Administration, with a specialization in Museum Administration and Education – also known as the world’s longest degree name! This summer, I am working with Ohio Designer Craftsman and the Ohio Craft Museum, which is both a membership and support program for Ohio artists and a museum that showcases fine craft from the state and around the world. You can learn about the amazing work they do by visiting their website. My main project will be working with the Young Masters summer camp and the Teen Summer workshops as a sort of logistical/operations manager, but I also get to design and teach my own art lessons, and assist with anything else the Education department (or anyone else!) can throw at me.

I spent the first part of the week going to orientation and meeting the other Fellows, getting settled, trying to remember everyone’s names (!!), getting supplies ready for camp, and beginning to plan my own lessons.  I have a giant Pinterest board going with all my lesson ideas and supply lists, and spent several hours digging through bins of supplies, organizing fabric scraps, and searching for foam craft stamps online (they’re surprisingly hard to find!).  Camp doesn’t start for a couple of weeks, so I have some time to get organized and to decide what I want to teach.

My desk and my Pinterest board of lesson ideas for Young Masters camp.

The big event this week is our table at the Columbus Arts Festival.  In the Hands-On Art area, children and their families can participate in art activities and make their own projects to take home.  At the Ohio Craft Museum table, I helped children make “wearable collages” by adding feathers, sequins, patterned paper, and other fun items to clear name badges.

Come make art with us!

Our presence at the festival is a great way to reach out the community and let people know what the Ohio Craft Museum has to offer.  Many people who stopped by had never heard of the museum before, so I was really excited that I could give them some information, a brochure or two, and a personal invitation to come visit the gallery.  And it was so great to see kids excited about making art!  All day I saw kids proudly wearing their collage badges, and showing off their other projects and masterpieces they created.

Kids making their collages to wear.

Volunteers and I will be manning the table all weekend, so if you are at the festival, stop by and say hello!  If this week is any indication of what the rest of the summer will be like, I know that I am in for an amazing experience!  Bring it on 🙂

The question. THE question. The question.
When you’re thirty it might be a marriage proposal, but when you’re eighteen, just having caught your thrown graduation cap, its, “What the hell am I going to do with my life?!”

It’s a scary concept. To think that steps we make -two years after we became legally certified to drive a car!- will forever shape your future…So when I went to college, I framed the question to myself a thousand different ways: What do I want to study for four years? How do I want to spend my time? Where do I want to work? What do I want from life? What’s going to make me happy?
Breaking it down didn’t make it simpler. Any way I looked at it, spending the best 8 hours of the day at work was depressing. “There’s not a great alternative to a job, though,” my logic went, “so I guess if I have to toil a third of my day away it better be for a pretty good reason.”

That is how I came to be a nonprofit nerd (I read blogs and books about donor cultivation…don’t’ judge) and ultimately a Columbus Foundation Fellow for Children’s Hunger Alliance.
Today I finished my first week as an intern for Children’s Hunger Alliance, a nonprofit that acts as a middleman between USDA funding for food and locations that have hungry children to feed. For most of the year, they’re facilitating breakfasts and after school school snacks, but when school is out, CHA works to provide healthy lunches and nutrition education for kids who might not get a nutritious meal anywhere else.

I can say at the end of my first week that CHA has proven to be everything I anticipated from a nonprofit. It’s pace is fast and the computers are slow, the employees are over tasked and probably underpaid, their passion is infinite and their greed is nonexistent. I get stiff sitting at my computer, but then I stand up and drive to a site. A four year old smiles and talks to me as she hula-hoops on a full stomach and her older sister (no more than 6) stays close by, watching her protectively. I don’t know where their parents are or what they would be doing if they weren’t here in this moment talking to me. And I don’t want to think about it, especially as the boys scuffle and strut about, straining to show their dominance in the only way they know how, and the older girls talk about who said who wants to fight who.

Another random child runs up to hug me on my way out. I don’t know her, but as I walk out knowing that my time at the computer leads to a meal, a smile, and a hug in a child’s day, I’m pretty sure I’ve answered the question.

People are the only things that matter, and the only things worth working for. I’m so fortunate that I get to spend my time on things that matter ❤

My first week as a member of the Columbus Foundation Summer Fellowship has been an exciting time! The orientation at the Foundation was much more enjoyable than I anticipated and my fellow Fellows were as nice and as fun as anyone could hope.

My beginning experience with FLOW was equally satisfying, I met Laura a member of the Board and Alice the Watershed Coordinator, they were very excited and had a long list of items for me to cover over the course of the summer. My first afternoon was mainly spent putting dates on my calendar and reading over different documents and initiatives of the organization.

On Tuesday, my first full day I was happy to accompany Alice down to the banks of the Olentangy near the Horseshoe. We met a high school summer animation class which was studying the flow of the river and wanted to know about the river now compared to when the Fifth Avenue dam was still in place. Their questions varied from wanting us to identify wildflowers, trees, birds, and turtles, to ones such as “what natural and manmade threats are facing the river?”

It was a great experience for me to help answer younger kids’ questions as well as to test my knowledge of wildflowers and other species. I also was greatly encouraged to see the development of the new wetlands beside the Olentangy and see that they were already attracting different species. I was also impressed by the use of living willow stakes to help secure the embankment and to protect it against erosion.

One of my first tasks was to examine the city parking ordinance and to look for ways to make it more environmentally friendly. Some easy suggestions revolve around the interpretations of the current wordings having to do with tree placement, and future suggestions include using more bioswales to deal with storm water. It is a real example of how positivism could make a real difference in the city and for the watershed.

Over the rest of the week I helped explore sites for the Anheuser-Busch volunteer cleanup site, participated in a science committee meeting, and began reading over the watershed action plan. I look forward to the next nine weeks and can’t wait to visit more of the watershed’s tributaries!