Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

This week, the usual work at MORPC was slightly different than usual. On a normal week, I am in the office from Tuesday to Thursday, but due to holidays and flex time usage, I was in person on Tuesday only. Thus, a lot of my work was concentrated was more condensed than usual, but still impactful.

Workforce development was the core of my research this week. On Monday, I was tasked with attending a webinar in which Ohio regional planning entities all met to discuss their initiatives and successes. One of these respondents was a group who received a wastewater workforce development program to help solve the lack of talent for these kinds of jobs. Since this program was widely effective, I took the initiative to see what this would look like in the Central Ohio region. This involved finding funding opportunities online, exploring different career technical programs and schools, and gauging stakeholder interests.

Beyond this, we also had the Ohio Representative for the Economic Development Administration (EDA) come to MORPC to meet with different local municipalities to hear their needs for grant-funding opportunities and assistance. This was a tremendous event to participate in since I got to see how federal agencies interact with local efforts. Economic Development is also the field that I see myself pursuing for a large chunk of my career so being able to meet with all the different communities was ana amazing opportunity.

Beyond these items, I used my flextime for the latter half of the week to visit my friends in Washington, DC. Usually, vacation days aren’t given to interns, but since I worked for MORPC over the week at the Columbus Arts Festival, I had time built up to take off Thursday and Friday. This allowed me to be able to drive to DC and spend that time with networking around the capital as well as sightseeing. Overall, this week has been tremendous with lots of adventure and opportunities.

Hello Everyone!

I completed my third week at Flow and am continuing to enjoy it so much! Last week, I spent much of my time outside with volunteers from STANTEC, an engineering firm. It was their week in the community so they scheduled multiple events with us around our different sites. Even with the extreme heat, the volunteers did an incredible job and made lots of progress at our sites. The heat has shown to be a problem for many of our plants especially our newly planted trees. Volunteers dedicated so much time to helping us out all across the city to ensure the plants were safe from the weather. It has been wonderful to meet so many passionate individuals all from different areas coming together to help. In addition to meeting so many great people at these events, I have learned a lot of volunteer management and organization. It is difficult to plan out which locations need to most help and when this is best. With the assistance of the FLOW Ameri Corps member, Maggie, I have learned the best way to do so and how to do it in an effective way.

In addition to the community events, I spent much of my week working on my main project, The 2024 Tree Giveaway. This week I began contacting local schools, churches, business, etc. in order to begin finding permanent locations for our 1800 trees. I have not done cold calls before this and was nervous to start this process, however it has gone very well so far! I am looking forward to continuing to make connections and begin making significant progress on the project.

Also this morning, we have a new member of the FLOW team starting! We are mostly volunteer based so it is very exciting to have a new permanent person to work with. I am looking forward to the upcoming week and continuing to learn about the Columbus environment and community.

Hello Everyone! I hope everyone had a great and productive week!

As stated in my prior blogs, one of my most significant responsibilities this summer is helping with CSB’s big, annual Founder’s Awards Celebration this upcoming September. This week, I have been working with the logistics surrounding the event and have been in contact with important people who all contribute to making events like this successful. I have been given tasks such as booking our photographer, catering, venue, parking arrangements, etc. I am grateful to have such a supportive team at CSB. My coworker, Chad, arranged a meeting with me and helped me work through all the essential things that go into venue planning, such as audio and visual, table arrangements, parking costs, etc. 

I am also excited to announce that all of our chosen honorees for the event have responded to their offer and are willing to accept their reward and be recognized at our event. It is a great honor to earn these awards, and I am excited to meet our partners who have done such impactful work toward ending homelessness. 

We are working with NBC4 to arrange interviews with each of our honorees to capture their work and highlight their individual passion and contribution to our mission of ending homelessness. Right now, and for the upcoming weeks, a part of my job is to help document our honorees’ availability, including their preference of location and other details for their interview. I am currently coming up with thought-provoking and unique interview questions for each of our honorees that will help capture their impactful role in the community. For the upcoming week, I am excited to meet with Amber from our r+r team to brainstorm designs for the new landing page we are working on for our website to highlight our 2024 honorees!

This week began on Sunday with setting up for the Juneteenth event featuring Dudley Edmondson. Dudley’s profound connection with nature and his mission to inspire people of color to embrace the outdoors was truly inspiring. His speech resonated with me on a personal level, coming from an Indian family that encouraged me to explore the outdoors. I felt a deep gratitude for having had that opportunity and the lasting impact it has had on my life and career. Someday I hope to inspire other people of color to connect with mother nature as much as Dudley does.

After helping with the setup, I joined the guided bird walk with Dudley Edmondson and Nicole Jackson. It was fascinating to learn about bird species I had never heard of before and to see Dudley effortlessly identify birds by their songs. This experience deepened my appreciation for birdwatching, as I had never tried birding before I worked here. Later in the week, I wrote a blog recapping the event, which will be published on Monday, and created a social media post featuring some of the photos I took during the event.

Most of the week was dedicated to working on my sponsorship project, and I am pleased to say I am almost finished with the first draft. Additionally, I had the opportunity to attend a board meeting with various members who support the Grange Insurance Audubon Center. I learned that the City of Columbus isn’t as involved in supporting the center as they should be. I also shadowed my boss during a meeting with County Administrator Kenneth Wilson at the Franklin County Government Center. This experience taught me how challenging it can be to convey the importance of a mission you deeply believe in, especially when working with government entities that have numerous priorities. However, Kenneth seemed receptive to our message and provided us with some helpful contacts.

On Juneteenth, the center remained open, and I learned how to set up the activity cart, which we take outside the center to engage visitors with fun activities. This time, we focused on birdwatching, but the heat kept many people from stopping by. An exciting moment came when we received a call from a visitor about an American White Pelican sighting. Initially skeptical, we went down to the boat ramp to check it out, and sure enough, it was indeed a White Pelican! This was a rare sighting, as these birds are typically found near the ocean and are not common in Ohio. I captured some videos and made an informative social media post about this unique occurrence.

https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=7512745862170599

Another interesting event happened that same day. A visitor used the microwave in the staff break room without anyone noticing, and unfortunately, she heated something up incorrectly, causing a lot of smoke. The fire department was called, but she left before we could find out what happened. The building smelled like burnt popcorn for the rest of the day, and we are now waiting for the microwave to be fixed. This incident made meal prepping my lunches for the week a bit challenging.

Today, I had the amazing opportunity to facilitate the “Let’s Go Birding” guided bird walk event for Pride Month. While I didn’t lead the walk, I helped set up the coffee cart, greeted and signed in participants, and handed out free merchandise at the end. I had written a media advisory about the event earlier in the week and sent it out to many LGBTQ organizations in Columbus. We had 21 people signed up, the largest number for a bird walk in a long time, and about ten attendees showed up. It was a large and enthusiastic group, and we all had a great time. I took some pictures during the walk and connected with fellow birders who had more knowledge than I did, which was a fantastic learning experience. We tried to spot the pelican again, but it was gone, likely back on its regular migration route.

This week was packed with enriching experiences, from engaging with community members at the Juneteenth event to learning more about bird species and improving my skills in communication and event facilitation.

This week, I’m starting to brainstorm for our Kiwanis Charity Regatta social campaign. The Kiwanis Charity Regatta is an online fundraiser where people can donate to non-profits through votes. Each vote costs a dollar, and that dollar pushes the organization’s boat closer to their fundraising goal. Bridgeway’s goal this year is $1,000, and I want to use our social media campaign to help us hit that target.

I’m also starting to create some video content to highlight the different programs at Bridgeway beyond just our summer activities.

One program at Bridgeway is the Family Partnership program. It integrates typically developing kindergarteners and preschoolers to model social and behavioral skills for kids with developmental delays. I’ve set up a meeting with the team to get their insights on what parts of the program we should highlight.

Another I want to showcase is the Young Men’s Club led by Henry Newberg. This club gives students a space to discuss their personal growth. I’ve reached out to Henry and am thinking of asking every student in the video the same question like, “How has this club helped you gain confidence within yourself?”

I’m also working on planning a field day for the students in the second week of July. The event will take place at locations at Bridgeway. Rachel mentioned that the staff at Bridgeway have been wanting to organize a field day for a while, and that would be a great chance to test things out before planning a bigger event.

Currently, I’m starting to order materials this week and had a scheduling meeting with Rachel to iron out the details. Although I’m nervous about everything coming together smoothly, I’m really excited for the kids to have this experience.

Week 3 introduced me to the concept of working from home. Although I had previous experience working remotely during the Covid years when I was still in high school, I was a stranger to professional work. City Year Columbus is kind enough to give us Juneteenth off, so I worked remotely the other days. Although it went over smoothly for the most part there was some miscommunication about expectations for a project which could have been avoided had we been in person. However, as fate would have it the power went out that day. 

One of my tasks was drafting thank you letters to everyone who had given to the organization in the past month. We lacked a personal aspect to the cards, so we incorporated language about the seasons to connect with our donors. I loved being able to infuse my passion for nature in my professional writing. I feel like it’s rare that our passions align with our work, especially in corporate settings so it was refreshing to get to lean into mine.

During the previous week, I had been mentored in our mailing communications so this week I was allowed to experiment with our monthly newsletters. I designed the June and July editions trying to maintain our brand image while exploring different stories. I also had meetings with Andrew and Ashley who are part of our Core Talent Acquisition (CTA) team and oversee recruitment. 

While meeting with Ashley she posed a question asking if the Devo team would collaborate on one-pagers about the upcoming AmeriCorps members with headshots and bios. I quickly accepted as I was already thinking about ways to highlight the AmeriCorps members more through social media/recruitment.

My favorite project I got to work on was a graphic that would be handed out at the Columbus Book Festival detailing the work City Year Columbus does, our connection to the importance of literacy, and statistics depicting the impact we’ve had. I had already worked with Canva in the past for school projects, so I was familiar with the platform. I was able to find a design template I liked and adjust it to meet the organization’s needs. 

Overall the past week taught me the importance of clear and constant communication as the only path forward to growth and eventually success. 

Hi everyone! This week was full of team collaboration and brainstorming to start the rollout of our StoryCorps project. Each member of the team plays an integral role in making sure the research project succeeds and further educates people on the accelerating and decelerating factors in obtaining wealth. Our team meeting on Tuesday is where we give updates, things to do, and raise any questions we might have about upcoming projects. In this team meeting, I participated (YAY) by giving some updates on the donor survey, rough ideas for research project marketing, and input on other projects.

On Thursday, the whole team came together to brainstorm some ideas for the marketing rollout for the research project. Everyone was just throwing out ideas that the general public would be receptive to. I never considered myself to have much expertise in marketing but the meeting format allowed for complete creativity with no pressure. Some ideas worked and some ideas didn’t, though allowing for everyone to be a part of the process makes the final result even better. Toward the end of the meeting, we came up with a strong working idea that we could start branding the project in an informative and interactive way. Next week, we have another meeting scheduled to discuss final rollout plans and ways to invite the public to interact with StoryCorps.

In addition to the rollout of the research project, we are rolling up our sleeves and preparing for The Women’s Fund Summer Party. The summer party is an event where our board members and other active participants for the Women’s Fund get to meet, mingle, eat, and celebrate what WFCO has accomplished this year while recognizing attendees’ efforts in making it happen. I am both nervous and excited for the summer party because I’ll be able to connect with some great people though I don’t know anyone! Nonetheless, it’ll be fun. Hope everyone’s week went well! 

See y’all in the next one!

Kennedy Smith

By Kanyinsola Adesoba

As I conclude my third week at Seeds of Caring, I find myself increasingly immersed in the program and more comfortable with my responsibilities. I have now taken on a leadership role in our summer programming, focusing on teaching children how to repurpose items they might have initially considered trash. Through activities centered on recycling, reusing, reducing, and ultimately repurposing, we engaged the kids in thoughtful discussions and hands-on projects.

One of the most memorable moments this week was a conversation I had with a fourth grader. She had tried to create something unique with the materials provided but became disheartened when her project didn’t turn out as she had hoped, especially after seeing her classmates’ successes. I approached her and reminded her of the story we had read, where the protagonist faced several failures but persisted, eventually achieving her dreams. I told her that failure is not a measure of our potential for greatness and encouraged her to keep trying. This conversation had a profound impact on me, reinforcing the importance of resilience and perseverance.

This week’s summer programming has been smooth and rewarding. It has also broadened my perspective on potential career paths. Initially, I was drawn to pediatric nursing because of my love for children. However, my experiences at Seeds of Caring have sparked a growing interest in non-profit organizations, showing me how I can merge my nursing career with community service to create a meaningful impact.

In addition to leading the summer programs, I have been deeply involved in research projects aimed at our organization’s expansion. This has provided me with valuable insights into what it takes to open a business in a new city, including demographic analysis, community needs assessment, and strategic planning.

When not engaged in summer programming, I contribute to office preparations, such as prepping blankets, creating kits for veterans, and organizing meals for donations to other non-profit organizations like Ronald McDonald House. Attending various meetings has been another highlight, as they offer a wealth of knowledge and new ideas about the non-profit sector.

Overall, I am fitting in well at Seeds of Caring and am grateful for the opportunities to learn and grow. This experience continues to shape my career aspirations and my understanding of how to make a lasting difference in the community.

Until next week, have a great time!

Kanyin