Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

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. 

Two weeks has just FLOWN by.  Projects, volunteer days, and meetings.  Research, writing, and diagraming.  It feels like I have done just about everything in the past two weeks that could possibly be done at one job in an entire summer and yet every day I am discovering something new.  During my second week at Homeport I have really dived into Standard Operating Procedures project.  The first portion of my project is documenting everything that goes into putting on monthly Produce Fair in three of our largest rental communities.  Each month the MidOhio Foodbank drops off up to 12,000 pounds of produce and perishable food items to be distributed for free to families in the area.   Through these donations we are able to provide healthy food options for hundreds of low-income families in our communities each month.  In order to write about how these produce fairs run I had to experience them first hand, so this past week I got to participate in my first produce fair.  It was a lot of fun working with other volunteers and serving over 400 people.  One of the coolest parts of the day was meeting Isaac, a 14 year old boy who lives in the Homeport community and first came through the line to receive food for his family.  After he finished helping his mom carry the food back to their apartment he came back and asked if he could help.  The minute he threw on a green Homeport T-shirt he was in work mode and was busy helping as many people as he could carry their items back to their cars or apartments.  It was really inspiring to see how excited and willing he was to help.  This produce distribution was a lot of fun and it really opened my eyes beyond everything I have been writing about and researching in the office.  It was great to be in the communities and put faces to names and real life stories to the numbers.

Hard at work at the Homeport Produce Fair

We distributed almost 12,000 pounds of fresh produce!

Our lovely volunteer ladies

I had my first little accomplishment last week! I was able to set up a meeting with one of our potential partners for the plot against hunger, Momentive. Today I am on-boarding them into the program and orienting them to what the initiative is about. Essentially, we are trying to incorporate the corporate and other organizations in the Columbus area into the plot against hunger through their adopting of a plot that consists of two beds. One bed will be planted by them and the other by the Mid-Ohio Foodbank. The produce from plot planted by us will go to our food pantry and their plot will be theirs to keep or donate. The idea is that a garden is an environment in which those involved are connected via the similar and the grounding nature of the work they do. No matter what your background. everyone is pulling weeds and fostering growth for the same outcome. This breeds a perfect environment to begin the conversation about food insecurity and our food system through social change and cohesion among community members. The hope is that this conversation will spark interest in furthering the Foodbank’s goal of “ending the line” and alleviating food insecurity.

It is important however to make note that we are not interested in promoting the creation of community gardens in food insecure areas. This has proven to only put the burden on an already heavily burdened population to not only continue with their daily tasks but to add on another huge and time consuming task of growing their own food. The idea is that for those who are unfamiliar with the food insecurity in Columbus, working in a garden can serve as a platform for a dialogue that gets people interested in the topic and hopefully called to action against it. There are many already existing, well connected and integrated community gardens and urban farms in Columbus that are providing fresh food at farmers markets and for those involved in the gardening and upkeep. There are also a few co-ops and Community Supported Agriculture systems in place that buy in bulk from local and regional growers of the best produce to help support the smaller farmers and industries as well as create a network of food security within their communities.

Finally, the Foodbank has an endless number of opportunities for volunteering and donations that will help further the cause. The issue is not that we do not have enough food, it is getting the food we do produce in excess to the hungry mouths before it goes bad. We throw a lot of food away and the Foodbank works very hard to efficiently gather the food that would be discarded and distribute it to the over 600 hundred agencies that can use it to feed their communities. Gardens are a luxury. They require spare time and they teach valuable often forgotten knowledge about how to “grow” literally and figuratively. Therefore, for those of us with spare time, I encourage us to use the garden as a way to bring a community together and begin a conversation about the injustice of food insecurity in our own backyards. Let’s work to distribute the food we produce in an equitable way. There should not be winners and losers when it comes to food access especially when there is such a surplus.

Its the end of my second week as a full-time Fellow, and as cliche as it sounds, I don’t know where the time went! My main task at Children’s Hunger Alliance is to assign volunteers to appropriate sites, which was hella-intimidating a week and a half ago when I literally knew nothing about these people or places.

To place one volunteer, I need to track down the site’s director to inquire about their needs; double-check with the site’s sponsor; solidify the volunteer’s availability and expectations, and get their approval for a suggested location; inform and remind the site’s “educator” and data collector about their added help; educate the volunteer on the particulars of a site; meet the volunteer on their first day of a site to make introductions; and then finally, send emails the next day to all parties to get a feel for how the session went.

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The keystone, I’ve learned, to this and all endeavors is- communication! Literally, my job is just communicating, all day long. Making sure everyone knows what they’re supposed to know is a fulltime job. If everyone in the world knew everything there is to know, I can’t imagine what humankind could accomplish…

It’s ironic that it took me this long to realize the value and importance of communication, as I’m going to graduate with a B.A. in it next December, but of course experience is real learning. I’m glad I’ve learned this lesson so early in my career and life. I know realize the role software and systems that are designed to streamline communication, but more importantly, this experience has forced me to evaluate my own communication skills. Am I doing the best I can to clearly transfer relevant information to everyone around me, including my future self?

As budding professionals, we should all work to make this answer “yes.” If we start now, I foresee a smoother road ahead for everyone 🙂

This week did not have a central theme or specific project that I worked on. The fact that I am able to work on multiple projects at once is not a bad thing but an attribute to the work of the Boys and Girls Club of Columbus. Since I will be facilitating many summer learning activities throughout the Summer Brain Gain program I wanted to spend as much time with theclub members as possible.  I spent some time at all of the clubs this week but spent the most time at Westside and Southside.

Westside is currently participating in a Robotics program sponsored by NASA! Earlier in the week I went shopping for all of the supplies and it was awesome to see the raw materials turn into mini rockets made from pop bottles!

When I was at Southside on Thursday I was able to participate in one of the Brain Gain modules focusing on interacting with peers. The club members had to go around and interview “celebrities” and ask them about their clothing. I was a guest “celebrity”. Of course I was wearing an Ohio State shirt and the conversation eventually turned to the one time I met Braxton Miller in person (the students were quite excited).

On Friday I spent some time at the R.I.S.E site in Weinland Park. We made flags to represent ourselves in honor of Flag Day! Pictured below is my flag! Speaking of Flag Day. ..I was fortunate enough to accompany more than 60 club members from all of clubs in Columbus to the Flag Day ceremony at City Hall.  The club members played an integral part of the program holding several flags and a few members had speaking roles. I learned a lot of new information. For example Hawaii joined the union in 1959! I expected it to be earlier than that for some reason.  Well this was just a glimpse into the MANY different activities I partake in at the Boys and Girls Clubs of Columbus on a daily basis!  Next week I begin the pre-assessment surveys for the Summer Brain Gain so stay tuned!

Where I work everyday!

In honor of Flag Day and the World Cup!