Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

It’s been a scorching week in Columbus, and people and animals alike are feeling the heat. LifeCare Alliance partners with The Columbus Division of Fire and fire departments in Marion and Madison counties to help our clients and community members ‘Beat the Heat.’

The Beat the Heat Fan drive began back in June and is still going strong. Fans are collected and distributed daily to ensure that individuals at risk of heat stroke or heat exhaustion are kept cool. With temperatures climbing above 90 degrees this week, these donated fans are literally the difference between life and death. This week alone, LifeCare has donated over 700 fans to people in need. Since the Fan Campaign’s creation over a decade ago, LifeCare has distributed over 15,000 fans.

Keep an eye out for homebound individuals and older adults in your neighborhood. Symptoms of heat exhaustion and heat stroke include:

Heat exhaustion                           Heat Stroke       

Heavy sweating                                 No sweating

Paleness                                              Red, hot, dry skin

Muscle cramps                                   Muscle cramps

Headache                                            Body temperature of 103+

Queasiness                                          Nausea, vomiting

Dizziness                                              Dizziness

If you think a person is suffering from heat exhaustion or a heat stroke, call 9-1-1 immediately! Then offer the person a cool drink (non-alcoholic) and a cool washcloth placed on their forehead, back of the neck, and/or wrists.

Linda Collins and Oreo enjoy their new fan

Linda Collins and her dog, Oreo, are a great example of how a fan donation can benefit an entire household. (Can you imagine being a dog with all that fur in this heat?) When the pair received their fan, they also learned of the Pet Care Program. Collins and Oreo have been included on our revamped Animeals routes and will begin to receive dog food deliveries shortly.

If you or someone you know is in need of a fan, please call the Fan Campaign Hotline of LifeCare Alliance at 614-437-2870.

For more information about the Fan Campaign, check out http://www.lifecarealliance.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=175&Itemid=13

As I near the end of the data collection phase of my research project, I find myself staring at some intimidating spreadsheets.  I created them, and yet I can relate to the bewilderment of Dr. Frankenstein upon the completion of his monster.

The next step is to analyze the numbers and translate them into English.  This process is relatively unknown to me (I make no claims of being a statistician).  Not only do I need the answers to certain questions from the data, but I need to determine what those questions are.

This week the Summer Fellows had their second Learning Session of the summer with Michelle Vander Stouw, an expert in strategic planning for non-profit organizations.  Part of her presentation focused on the importance of data and research for defining the conditions and environment of a nonprofit’s work.  I found this particularly relevant to my present conundrum.  The advice she gave was that the data should tell a story, a concept I have often heard mentioned.

But now I realize this is no amateur feat.  Right now it feels more like I am interrogating the data; trying to make it talk.

Happily, Michelle provided a few places to start in order to frame this data narrative, so I am not without ideas. Consider, who is your audience? What is your message? What kind of data will be useful?

Ultimately, I know that these are the questions I need to answer in the final report. However, I don’t think I can coerce my spreadsheets into this level of cooperation just yet. Right now I am starting with the basics, asking them simple questions.  “What is the average of these numbers?” “Are there outliers?”  “What is the total?”  My hope is that if we proceed slowly, the numbers will start to talk. And eventually, once they’ve warmed up to me, maybe then they will tell their story.

Part of the Hilliard Free Lunch Summer Camp for Kids 4th of July Parade Float
12 nationalities represented at just one of our three camp sites!

It’s official.  Summer Camp is in full swing.  With this comes a lot of driving.  Driving between the three Summer Lunch sites, the SON Ministries office, our partnering churches and various businesses throughout Hilliard has brought me to appreciate my old, green pickup truck in a way that would make any country music artist proud.  I even had the opportunity to take my truck for a cruise around Hilliard in this year’s 4th of July Parade.

I spent the week prior to the parade working with the kids to make decorations for my  truck, coordinating with the city to sign up for the parade, collecting 55 pounds of candy and printing over 1,000 fantastically colorful flyers.  It was my first time really getting a chance to experience the larger community of Hilliard and I thought I was pretty prepared for it.

The community turned out in force.

Two miles of side streets absolutely packed with people.  1,000 flyers and enough candy to feed a small army later… we were almost to the end of the parade.

The festivities on the fourth shortened one of the precious nine weeks we have to spend with our kids, so when we came back the following Monday, we hit the ground running.

The phone calls and emails I’d been making, along with support from the rest of our staff, started to pay off in the form of Special Guest visits.  Last week we had a police officer from the K-9 unit and his dog visit all three of our sites!

Officer Rogers and his dog, Lucky, showing off for the kids.

This week holds more even more guests.  KidSMILES will be making an appearance for a hygiene presentation on Friday, in addition to an ICU doctor!

Today, we packed up 100+ of our closest friends (between the grades of kindergarten and sixth grade) and took a field trip to the Franklin County Fairgrounds for their “Fun & Learn” program.  We made robots out of toothbrushes, met Pedro the Donkey and toured the 4-H booths and the Historical Village.

Stayin’ cool in some shades at the Franklin County Fairgrounds

New soccer goals requested, designed and constructed by some of our kids!

On top of the special guests and field trips and parades, we have some projects in the works also.  Thanks to Home Depot and their donation of more PVC pipe than any one person should ever need, our kids designed and constructed new, improved soccer goals!  This week we’re working on painting the goals and attaching the nets all in preparation for…

Family Night!

Our two larger sites are inviting friends and family of the kids in our camp, as well as our volunteers and staff, to visit our camp “after hours”.  The majority of our kids are picked up and dropped off every day by bus and we rarely get to interact with any of their families.  This is an opportunity to change that.

We’ve been working over the past few weeks to include exhibition soccer and dodgeball games, a halftime show headlined by our dance team, refreshments provided by our baking team, an art gallery and a talent show!  Are you ready for my favorite part?  All of these aspects of our family night are completely child run.  We’ll provide some food and opportunities for the families to get connected to local resources, but the kids do all the rest.

Oh yeah, we also run four hours of programming at three different sites and provide a free and nutritious breakfast and lunch to 200 kids five-days a week.  It’s sometimes easy to get caught up in the day to day details and miss the bigger picture of what I get to be a part of here.  When you step back, it’s pretty amazing.

My biggest goal this week is to track down a response from 42 organizations that don’t have financial information about their programs available from an online source.  I am calling them all in order to determine A) if they have any programs that are specifically for women or girls, and B) if they can estimate the total expenses of this program for me.

These 42 organizations make up about half of the complete list of non-profit entities which I identified as those which sponsor programs for women and girls in the central Ohio area.  The half of the list which I called is those organizations which only partially fund programs for women and girls, whereas the other half is organizations who solely support women and girls.

I began making calls equipped with a script that went something like a choose-your-own-adventure story.

They all began the same:

“Hi, my name is Caroline and I am a fellow at the Women’s Fund of Central Ohio.  I am doing a research project on programs that support women and girls in the central Ohio area.  Does your organization sponsor any programs that specifically target women or girls?”

And then, there were two options (not accounting for the “well, maybe” category that a handful of people opted for).

Option A: “Yea, we do. But I’m not the best person to talk to about that. Let me get someone for you.”

To which I responded excitedly, “Great! I would like to learn more about it. I am specifically interested in gauging the total expenses for the program because I am trying to assess the total of all dollars spent on programs for women and girls in the Columbus area and this program would be an important piece of that.”

Or, Option B: “No, I don’t think we have anything specifically for girls.  We have girls in our program, but nothing specific.”

To which I responded appreciatively anyway, “Oh alright. That answers my question. Thank you so much for your time. Have a good day!”

As you can assume, those who chose Option A were my favorites. And they got to continue their adventure.

Once I was speaking to the person most able to answer my questions about the organization’s programs and expenses, I learned about a lot of interesting initiatives.  It was superbly enjoyable to learn a little bit about programs that serve women and girls that were previously unknown to me.  And among those organizations that do have programs for women or girls, I have had good success so far in also getting a close estimate of the dollars put into the program.  So goes my adventure in research for the Women’s Fund of Central Ohio. I think it is going to have a pretty rewarding ending.

This past week was a fun-filled week for the kids at ETSS Camp! The kids learned about healthy breakfast options and discussed about the types of foods they eat at home. What concerned me the most was that many of the kids told me they ate cookies for breakfast! Cookies?! I had to sit down with the kids and explain to them the importance of eating healthy and saving those cookies for a dessert. 

I also wanted the kids to sample a healthy breakfast option, so I brought in yogurt with grapes and blueberries! The kids really enjoyed it and said they would try something like this at home. Success!  It was a great way to teach the kids about healthy breakfasts. I wanted the kids to sample and then come up with a healthy breakfast meal of their own. They had great ideas: oatmeal, whole-grain cereal, and smoothies- YUM!

This week’s gardening was a take home garden activity. The kids were able to choose their own seeds from a variety of seeds (lettuce, peppers, cantaloupe, and others) and plant it in their small pot. They learned about how to care for their plants and the importance of watering daily. I hope their plants grow tall and strong!

Next week, the kids are going to learn about fast food and the health risks associated with eating these greasy foods. They’ll also learn about ways to make healthier choices at fast food restaurants as well as easy healthy recipes they can try at home. We’ll finish the week off by trying some bananas and blueberry “ice cream”- blended frozen bananas and blueberries! It’s a great dessert for everyone!

What a great week! The kids made their vitamin books and shares them with their family! The vitamin book was a small paper book with vitamins A, B, C, D, E, and K on each page. I had the kids wrote down the benefits of each vitamin and draw pictures of foods rich in these vitamins. It was a great way for the kids to learn vitamins. I have kids come up to me during lunch now and tell me that the orange they had for lunch has vitamin C in it! They tried some “Vitamin Water” that I brought in, which is simply water with sliced lemons and oranges. Some of the kids wished it had sugar in it…but most of the kids really enjoyed the water! It’s a great alternative to soda and juice!

With gardening, the kids have been working hard at the garden pulling weeds and watering our plants. It’s great to see how devoted the kids are to the garden and how well they work together! I hope they continue to run the community garden next year.

It’s been a great experience working for ETSS. I love the kids and the work I do with them! They are all really interested in learning about nutrition and gardening. Every day I’m learning more about the Ethiopian and Somali culture-the language, food, and religion. It’s interesting to learn about different cultures and the types of foods they eat at home. Some of the Somali camp kids shared with me a bananas and rice dish that they frequently eat at home!

Yesterday, my coworker Brett turns to me and goes, “What’s the law that says everything that can go wrong, will go wrong?” I said that would be Murphy’s….

Turns out my week 5 reflected very much of Murphy’s insightful theory. If you’ve been following my blog you may know CCA West has moved locations or really I should say is in the process of moving locations. We officially have moved everything out of the Boys and Girls Club with the exception of our printers and copy machines (vitals recruitment tools) so almost everything is physically in our new location on Dana Ave! This really is great news because it means I can start showing families and students are new school. However there have been a couple bumps in the road. For one our new location isn’t set up with internet yet, which is makes it very difficult to get any work done there. There is Internet at the Boys and Girls Club, just a mile or so away, but there is no furniture and thus no where to work. Also the building doesn’t have air conditioning and tends to resemble a rainforest-like atmosphere by about 11am. Brett and I have everything we need at our Main St. campus but that is all the way on the east side of town and right now we are focusing

Needless to say, we were spread pretty thin this week and Murphy seemed to be lurking around every corner. Just one of Murphy’s many appearances was on Thursday morning. Brett and I were planning on printing letters for new and returning students that included a school calendar, orientation dates and other back to school announcements. In the midst of this we realized we didn’t have an excel spreadsheet listing all the returning school students address and we would need to manually enter it from the files at West. Then we got a call from DotCom the printer company telling us they’d be at BGC in an hour to move our printers to Dana. So I did the mail merge for letters and labels of just the new students and then Brett quickly headed over to BGC to use their Internet and printers before the movers came. Well the storm that happened Wednesday afternoon caused BGC’s power to be down so Brett wasn’t able to print the letters and the elevator wasn’t working so the printers couldn’t even be moved. This little fiasco was followed by several others and just to further complicate things almost all of the CCA staff was in DC for a conference so it just Brett and I fending for ourselves. But despite these minor set backs we did enroll 5 more students at West. We’ll count that as one win for week 5… I can only hope that Murphy won’t show his face this coming week.

Nikki

Inhabiting a dark corner of the Northside attic stood a file cabinet with the tantalizing labels “Historical Records” and “Agency Publications.” Alas, it was locked! My supervisors have been joking with me over the past few weeks that they have lots of keys, most of which are unidentified, opening unknown drawers, cabinets, and doors. There are even play keys to nothing accidentally mixed in from the teachers, who give them to their students to play. Twice now I have uncovered mysterious sets of keys, adding them to my supervisors’ growing collection.

And now here I was at Northside, wondering how I might unlock these tempting drawers without spending hours trying one hundred unmarked keys. Maybe I could try my lock picking skills with a bobby pin? Or break the lock with a heavy binder? I did have my toolkit with me, so maybe a hammer would do the trick? And then I remembered the basket of keys I had seen in the front office. Scurrying downstairs, hoping to avoid the bobby pin option (knowing it wouldn’t end well), I looked more closely at the key basket and discovered that some of the keys were in labeled envelopes. And praises!, the tantalizing file cabinet also happened to be labeled with a number, with a corresponding envelope containing a key. Turns out it was the correct key!

And opening these two drawers I found . . . a few items. You would think if someone took the time to label the file drawer, it would be brimming with a trove of documents and photos, but alas, this was not the case. The drawer did contain a large photo album with pictures from the 1950s-2000s, so that is quite a find and served to dispel some of my disappointment at the lack of annual reports (of which pretty much all from Northside are missing).

Most importantly, by figuring out the key situation at Northside, I can now officially say that I have gathered (fingers crossed) all the historical materials from both Northside and Eastside. And I didn’t need to practice my lock picking skills (yet!) in the process.

I’ve had a busy fifth week at LifeCare Alliance, and it’s hard to believe that today marks the halfway point of my summer fellowship.

This week, I’ve been drafting letters to send out to pet stores and veterinary offices in the Greater Columbus Area. It’s always helpful to make connections within the community, and we’re hoping that these letters will help yield volunteers, donations, and/or partnerships. I’ve also gained experience putting together descriptions of the three volunteer positions associated with the Pet Care program – Senior Pet Care Volunteer Coordinator, Pet Food Delivery Volunteer, and Pet Food Processing Volunteer.

On Tuesday of this week, I was given the opportunity to attend a lunch session hosted by the Association of Fundraising Professionals and the Grant Professionals Association. The theme of this lunch session was “Storytelling for Fundraisers: Telling an Engaging Story about Your Organization’s Work.”

My very official name tag from the lunch session!

After just graduating with an undergraduate degree in English, I was extremely excited to see what this session was all about. We heard four mini-lectures about storytelling as it applies to grant writing, my favorite being “Telling Your Story in a Grant Proposal.” This breakout session suggested writing a grant using the same literary techniques that you would employ when writing a piece of fiction; your proposal should have a hook, main characters (your clients), a “villain” (the problem), and a hero (your non-profit). It was an informative way to tie together my passion for English with my passion for non-profit work. This was also a great opportunity to network with other professionals in Columbus, and I ran into several other summer fellows while I was there!

In my last post, I brought up a point at the very end and said that I would speak on it the next time. Well that time has come, and so I bring you: What brought me here, why I am attracted to the nonprofit sector.

As someone with a Marketing degree working on an environmental scan for a non-profit organization, it is clear how many similarities exist between working at a for-profit and at a non-profit. In some respects, it’s the same exact thing. The marketing department has to consistently work on branding and catering messages to target audiences, diligently watching social media sites and other public forum vehicles to make sure that word-of-mouth advertising is positive and accurate. The finance team has to watch the budget and ensure that the marketing and development creatives are setting reasonable goals. Operations and quality assurance managers make sure that all of the small pieces of the organization are functioning according to standard and work to repair any broken cogs in the processes. Everyone is constantly in and out of meetings, numbers have to add up, and deadlines are very real. This fellowship has allowed me to apply the concepts that I learned in my business management classes more fully than I ever did in internships at for-profit organizations. In fact, one of Alvis House’s greatest strengths is its business orientation and focus on outcomes.

The difference between them, then, and what attracts me to non-profit work, is where your hard work goes and who it benefits. Being able to meet and interact with the people that are profiting from my forty hours each week makes my work feel more real, tangible, and direct. While many for-profit organizations do great things for society, I’ve always been sort of demotivated by the obscure, faceless corporate entity that seemed to be the direct beneficiary of my efforts. After a hard day, I would think, “But what was all of that really for?”, and not being able to come up with an answer would sometimes leave me apathetic towards work. Don’t get me wrong—I am not suggesting that working at a for-profit is pointless or unimportant. Quite the contrary, actually, as our society would fall apart if nobody was churning out profit and providing necessary products and services. But for me personally, the apparentness and directness of the relationship between effort exerted and societal benefit gives me a much stronger drive to keep chugging along. And I am very grateful to this fellowship experience for helping me to make this discovery!