Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

My favorite Muppet – Beaker – demonstrating what my face will probably look like when the campers get here!

This is the last workday before our campers arrive!  It’s pretty quiet in the museum and office today, so I’m relishing the quiet and enjoying the chance to sit down and have a moment of peace, especially after the wild (and wet!) weekend at the Columbus Arts Festival, where we ended up making art with over 600 children and their families.  It’s nice to have a little bit of a break between the two busy events. Teen Summer workshops begin next week with classes what experiment with metals, draw cartoons, and create their own Muppets. I’m especially excited about the Muppets – I hope I can sneak into a few classes and make my own!  Campers sign up for half-day or whole-day classes, and there is room for 12 campers in each class, which means there be 36 tweens and teens invading the museum next week.

Although any teen can take these classes, they are a great opportunity for the artistically inclined to really dig into their interests, work with talented craftspeople who make their living creating and teaching, and get exposure to new techniques and hone the skills they already have.  And especially with these older students, it’s a great chance to show them that the arts can be a meaningful career choice, whether as a practicing artist or in an arts and culture non-profit organization, not just a hobby.  In the United States, the arts support 4.1 million jobs and create $135.2 billion in economic activity each year (Americans for the Arts).  Additionally, research has shown that participation in the arts and arts education in schools makes a measurable difference in student performance and learning, including higher SAT scores, better attendance and retention rates, and stronger reasoning and problem-solving skills.  I am the Vice-President of Central Ohio Student Advocates for the Arts (COSAA) at Ohio State, and this winter I had the chance to go to Washington, DC to participate in National Arts Advocacy Day and speak to Ohio legislators on Capitol Hill about the value of the arts and ask them to support funding for arts education and the National Endowment for the Arts. I feel passionately about my role as an arts advocate, and what is even more important than talking about the arts is doing them, and supporting other artists…especially young artists!  That’s why I love the classes and camps at the Ohio Craft Museum and am so honored to be a part of the important work they do.

This week, we finished prepping our 3 classroom spaces with all the supplies the teachers and classes will need for the week, putting up all the necessary signs and directions, and finalizing the schedules. But, I also got to work on my own art skills as well!  Loyal blog-readers will see all my projects in the weeks to come, but here’s a quick preview of some of the projects I am testing – punched tin, several (failed) attempts at making tie-dye with Sharpie markers and rubbing alcohol, and painted picture frames.

Samples of punched tin wall art (left), a punched tin lantern (middle), and a punched tin mobile (right)

When you spray rubbing alcohol on Sharpie markers, it makes a cool tie-dye effect…supposedly. Foil test fail (left), paper test fail (middle), fabric test SUCCESS (right)!

Painted picture frame for pet-project week. I chose my pet hedgehog as my model 🙂

It is hard to believe that it has now been two weeks working with FLOW and being a Columbus Foundation Fellow! I spent most of this week biking to the Clintonville office from my place near Ohio Dominican on the east side. This has given me the chance to see many of the Olentangy’s tributaries like Glen Echo and I even found some wild cherry trees to stop and chow down. I’ve also biked down the Olentangy bike trail, which is like the I-71 or 315 of Columbus bikeways. Many spots along that trail have noticeable projects that FLOW or friends of FLOW have worked on or improved. On one of my journeys home I was met by a FLOW volunteer who showed me the location of approximately 2000 trees have been planted in the last 7 years. Many of these trees are now over ten feet tall in some cases and absolutely thriving. I also got to explore various types of rain gardens and butterfly gardens that have been planted in Clinton-Como Park as well as a nice patch of wild black raspberries for my hungry days. Also in that park was a restoration made by AEP after the company buried a gas pipeline despite the wishes of the community. To AEP’s credit, the area they have replanted appears to be doing well and has brought back many amphibian species that previously were not to be found. Just down the trail from this park is a private community called Olentangy Village who have planted over 1000 trees in about 5 years and have made future plans for ecological restoration including signage that explains some of the areas they have restored. From this point to Ohio State you will come across the OSU Wetlands, which is a masterpiece of biological diversity. One day I nearly biked into a deer crossing the path and another I was distracted by an Oriole who was flying above. Nearly this whole stretch of the bike path has a low hanging mulberry tree which is great for a periodic snack. I encourage many of you if possible to bike commute, and if not at least get out and enjoy this beautiful trail and river!   Here are some wildflower pictures from this week,

Flax

Hemp Dogbane

I’ve never been much of a diagram guy.  My Public Health master’s program spends a good bit of time on program planning and teaching us to create things like logic models, but as someone who tends to be more narrative-focused, writing out my goals in little boxes seemed like an unnecessary step to me.

Continue reading →

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. .