Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

It’s crazy how close we are to the end of the fellowship. It feels like just yesterday was my first day here! This week, we hosted a group of 3rd-5th graders from the Homes for Families Foundation with Mr. D (Dwayne McGrath, Assistant Director) for mini camps on Tuesday and Thursday. I helped out with camp and mainly prepared the lunches. On Tuesday, we ordered pizza, so there wasn’t much to set up. However, Thursday was a different story, as we had a taco bar. My boss Sandy cooked nine pounds of meat in a crockpot, and I chopped up lettuce and arranged the other ingredients. It was all worth it because this group of kids was the sweetest, most engaged, and appreciative group we’ve had.

On Tuesday, we went macro netting, where many kids caught fish and did a craft with our resident artist. It was heart-wrenching to hear some kids say they didn’t have a home to take their crafts to. This goes to show the importance of nonprofits like the Homes for Families Foundation, which provides housing and social services to homeless families with the goal of empowering them to achieve stable housing and self-sufficiency. I’m grateful for the opportunity to meet these kids and learn more about the organization that provides them incredible opportunities that they would not have otherwise had.

Thursday’s highlight was partnering with Metro Parks for a rock-climbing session. Almost every kid made it to the top without fear, and I loved encouraging them and seeing their smiling faces. We have four more mini camps with Mr. D in the coming weeks, and I can’t wait to meet the other groups of kids.

My biggest accomplishment this week was my work on the sponsorship package. I had a meeting with Leigh Ann (Center Director) and Sandy, who gave me valuable feedback on what to change, including condensing it and highlighting the sponsorship’s impact. After several drafts, I managed to reduce the nine-page document to three pages. Initially, I felt unmotivated to keep revising the sponsorship because, as a student, I’m used to doing one or two drafts and submitting it. However, this experience taught me that in the real world, nothing is perfect on the first try, and it takes time and practice to get things right. I hope to receive more feedback on this draft so I can tweak it more and hopefully send it out before my time here ends.

Another notable event this week was leading a green infrastructure tour with Sandy for Advanced Drainage Systems Inc. This was my first time leading a tour, and Sandy and I were initially hesitant to do it since the group already knew about green infrastructure. However, after rehearsing a few times, the tour went well, and the group of about 15 people had a great time. I even learned about some of the center’s green features I didn’t know about, including a bioswale, a former wetland, and a graffiti art piece titled “Erica” that was saved from when this area was a warehouse district and impound lot before being transformed into the beautiful Scioto Audubon Metro Park and GIAC we know today. We took the group all over the building, explaining the green features and their benefits, including permeable concrete, the green roof, the rain chains reused from the warehouse district, geothermal wells, native plants in the gardens, and more. Reflecting on the tour, there were a few things I could have done differently, but I’m glad I got the experience and will be better prepared next time. This internship has taught me the importance of stepping out of my comfort zone and doing things I’ve never done before. It’s definitely a crucial step in my career and is helping me gain confidence in my abilities.

Hello, I hope everyone is having a great and productive week at their host sites! I started off my week by attending an event hosted by COHHIO (Coalition on Homelessness and Housing in Ohio) at the Bexley Public Library. COHHIO presented a powerpoint to us pointing out some of the root causes of homelessness and financial insecurity here in Ohio. Learning from COHHIO and the data they took time to collect, we can see that our community still has many systemic areas where we need improvement to ensure everyone has access to basic human needs. However, it was awesome to be in a room full of people from different organizations all coming together to engage in conversations surrounding the advancement of affordable housing and initiatives to end homelessness; this aspect allowed me to see all the great work that is currently being done for the cause in our community. It was interesting to see the way everyone had a different perspective of the issue based on their backgrounds. For example, a woman who owns apartment properties has had experience with tenants who have vouchers, and there were also people in the room who work to distribute those vouchers. With that being said, people had their own opinions on what areas of focus are most important and from what angles we should tackle the issue of homelessness to be most effective. 

This week I have also been working on my assigned projects while my supervisor is on vacation. I have developed our program booklet for our 2024 Founder Awards Ceremony and started coordinating with NBC4 to set up our scheduled interviews with our honorees which will take place the week of 7/29. I am also currently working on press releases to be sent out after the ceremony to highlight our honorees and why they are so deserving of our recognition!  

Hello! Week seven here at Legal Aid has been a great one with a lot of new projects starting up, along with old ones kicking into gear, both balanced with some fun. As I talked about before, I have been involved in creating what we’ve been calling our “Story Bank,” an easily accessible database of great and compelling client stories that could be used for a wide variety of purposes. I’ve been working a lot on it this week, and I am happy to say it is really coming along. Hopefully this will be a good resource long after I am gone.

Besides this, I’ve also been continuing in our preparation for the celebration of the Ohio Poverty Law Center’s anniversary party fundraiser. For those unaware, OPLC is Legal Aid’s advocacy affiliate that seeks to promote and work for the interests of those in poverty in Ohio policymaking. This upcoming event is very important, as raising funds for OPLC is critical for its work. While the event will occur over a month after I am done at Legal Aid, I am very grateful for the opportunity to help in its preparation and support.

Finally, I will soon be starting on assisting the Development team in applying for a massive federal grant, one that will take a lot of collaboration, ingenuity, and hard work to put forth an application for. On my end, I will be helping collect and sort through the immense amount of data the Supreme Court of Ohio provides on evictions in our service area (36 counties), hopefully providing some useful information that will assist in our final application. I’ve learned here that applying for federal grants such as this entail a lot of hours and hard work (estimated 120 hours of work!)—however, it is work like this that keeps Legal Aid going. I am excited to get more into this next week, hopefully sharpening my research skills in the process.

Hello everyone! This week I got to opportunity to meet with a few people that have relations with Leadership Columbus. Over this summer, I have made it a personal goal of mine to meet for coffee with people in my organization or have worked with my organization. For me, networking has not been my strong suit throughout college. I would get nervous even sending an email to someone I didn’t know. I have used this opportunity during this fellowship to change that, and I am so glad I did.

The first person I met for coffee this week was Jay Delaney, one of the board members at Leadership Columbus. I had met and spoken with Jay on a couple occasions already but I knew I wanted to get together and talk more with him one on one. I may have mentioned this before, but Leadership Columbus only consists of 5 employees including myself, which means we get to work very closely with our board members. I have been so grateful to have met and gotten to work alongside our board members this summer. I have gotten to see the behind the scenes work and the collaboration between us and the board members. Alright back to Jay, him and I had some great conversations about work experiences and the opportunities that networking can bring. After an extremely interesting life that including some filmmaking around the country, he ended up here at Ohio State University thanks to networking he had done with people around Columbus. It’s always wonderful to talk with someone on the board about what made them want to join our board in the first place. For Jay, a Signature Program graduate of 2020, his experience with us was so wonderful that he wanted to keep it going and continue to offer us his help as a board member and I thank him dearly for all he’s done. I truly took a lot of our talks and what doors can be opened just by sending a mere email or meeting for one coffee.

The second person I met with this week was one of my more nervous asks. I had the honor of meeting with a 2008 Signature Program graduate, Columbus Business First 2015 40 under 40 recipient, recipient of the 2019 Columbus Foundation’s Spirit of Columbus Award, and the first female auditor of the City of Columbus, Megan Kilgore. I feel like I just wrote that as if I was announcing it like she was on the first tee of a major golf tournament. I am so grateful to have talked with her and got to learn all about her job as auditor. I honestly didn’t know what our city auditor does but after she explained it, it made total sense. We had some great conversations revolving around technology and data that our city is using to help guide the auditor’s office into smart and correct decisions. We then got into our values and why we enjoy doing what we do. I’m a big Columbus Crew supporter so I found this really cool and interesting, but her help with the Save the Crew campaign in 2019 was what helped make her a recipient of the Spirit of Columbus award in 2019. To me, it is still so cool to see how strong our community was at that time to work endlessly in order to keep the Crew in Columbus. I am so glad we succeeded. This city would not be the same without the Crew here, and I genuinely mean that. Back to our conversations though, her and I also had talked about the importance of networking and she even recommended me talk with some more people as well. I fully plan on taking her up on that and meeting with these people. For me, the best thing I can do going into my senior year at Fisher’s College of Business is to just meet with as many people as I can to see the various industries and what’s all out there, as well as expanding my networking circle. I truly thank her for taking the time out of her day to meet with me.

This week, other than networking, was a preparation week for our Central Ohio Leadership Academy that takes place all next week. I am very excited for it and I am excited to share all about it but you’re going to have to come back and tune in next week to hear about my time there. Also, thanks to all of you reading this, I truly appreciate those who do. To see people actually read this inspires me to give it the best I can, so thanks.

I’ll see you next week,

Austin Gray

Hi Everyone! A high-paced start to the week whisked away the lull of the previous two weeks as food insecurity worsened and more client families needed food pantry boxes. Fortunately, the food pantry partnerships went even better than expected. My weekly food box pickup orders at 12pm each Wednesday with a food pantry partner drastically changed the ease of deliveries to clients. Instead of waiting for one hour each day for 2 or 3 food boxes, I got 5 boxes packed into my car within minutes, which cut down my total time spent delivering boxes by about 5 hours. So, despite having what looked to be a near “chaos week,” similar to the one I had during week 2, the week went by exceptionally smoothly. During my last few weeks at CRIS, we anticipate having an influx of new arrivals, and I look forward to continuing these partnerships and seeing how new ones enhance our work further. I have loved the partnership-building process and am so happy to see the hard work pay off. Hopefully, I can forge more partnerships before my time with CRIS ends.

This week, I am continuing to work on the charity regatta social media campaign. The idea around the campaign was for our boat to make its way around Bridgeway, but viewers need to guess the location of the boat. Every week, there will be a riddle that is posted to our social media that hints at the location of the boat. Viewers would need to guess the riddle in order to figure out the location of the boat. For each person with a correct guess, that person will receive a ticket for a raffle prize. This week, I posted a riddle that would hint people to guess that the boat is with our Bridgeway facilities team. This lead to us getting more engagement on social media because more people are commenting in order to guess the location. However, our amount of donations have been stagnant so I am hoping that it leads to more people donating later during the month.

I am also continuing to work on my photojournalism project. So far, I have been able to shadow the crisis stabilization team. I was able to shadow a couple of team members during some sessions. My favorite session was aimed at reinforcing the behavior of stopping when someone yells “stop.” Some students experience a behavior that leads to them running to places where they are not supposed to go. During this session, staff ran along with a student within the school and practiced stopping with the student when one of the staff said “stop.” I ran along with the staff and was able to take photos of this session. Though it was challenging, I felt like the staff made the session fun for everyone involved. It was one of the most unique moments I had during my time at Bridgeway, and I also had a blast going along with this session. As I was taking pictures, however, I realized that the pictures are not able to incorporate the dialogues that are just as important as the imagery. So, I am going to try to include sounds from the moments that I capture into the project as well so that viewers can both see and hear the bonds that staff have with their students.

At the start of August, I am attending a leadership retreat. In preparation for the session, the organization that it is through asked participants to complete a DiSC assessment. It is a self-assessment tool used to fit a person into one of four dimensions of human behavior: dominance, influence, steadiness, and conscientiousness. Your responses also create a pattern that places people into more specific personality types. The results generally apply to professional settings, but you can interpret them to represent your personal life.

This week, I received my results from the assessment. My highest dimension is dominance, and my result pattern is closely related to a result-oriented profile. I am not surprised by these results because I am highly independent, frustrated with the status quo, opinionated, and change-oriented. Many of the descriptions of how I work closely align with myself. It was reassuring to know that I have the personality type to take charge, take on challenges, and work well under pressure. These are all aspects that I pride myself on.

Although I do enjoy being a dominant person, there are many mental obstacles that you need to overcome to work well with other people. I have always enjoyed independent work, but as a city and regional planning major, most of my assignments involve group-based projects. While I usually take on a leadership role, as noted in my assessment results, d-dimension personalities can be arrogant, competitive, and uncaring due to being honest, blunt, and flaw-finding. Those are some of my most significant weaknesses. I enjoy group work if my team has a strong drive and produces quality work. This past semester, I did find myself in the middle of conflicts on two separate group projects due to people not wanting to do their part. I cannot sit back and will call them out because I thrive on validated conflict. It is not great, but I do love to prove a point.

The assessment also reassured me of many weaknesses I identified during this past academic year. As stated, I am not afraid of conflict; however, too much can lead to negative group dynamics. I am learning to pick my battles and loosen my grip on control. It is difficult for me to take a step back because if something is going to have my name on it, I want it to (at least) meet my quality standards. We all have different standards, which is something that I have to accept.

Further, I mentioned that the assessment stated I can come off as arrogant or condescending. I already know that my delivery and wording are areas of problem for me. I can be blunt because that is how I talk to myself, but not everyone is ready for unsweetened truth. I need to keep patience and delivery at the forefront of my mind.

I encourage everyone to take a DiSC assessment because the results are quite enlightening and a great way to identify areas that need development. I want to see how we will utilize this assessment during the leadership retreat. 

Hi everyone! This week was probably the most stressful week of the fellowship I’ve had yet as I have some new projects I am working on in the coming weeks. In addition, there’s a multitude of things happening in life that have stressed me out, one being the state of politics. Through that these planes projects are welcomed as they keep my mind off everything else.

One of the projects I have been assigned is in reference to our StoryCorps project. I am leading the charge on outreach and communications to our donors and partners to get them involved in recording a story. What this entails is me drafting up emails and strategies in which our CEO can communicate to partners/ donors as well as them team. Recently, our Research and Advocacy manger recorded a “how-to record a story”, making the process even more seamless for people who want to participate.

The second project I was assigned was venue research. The Women’s Fund hosts their annual Keyholder event which had guest speakers that speak to the general values of gender equity. It was previously held at the Mershon Theatre on Ohio State’s campus, but the space is not conducive for the new feeling they want for Keyholder. I am doing some venue research on what places give them the best space and price for the new vibe they are envisioning for Keyholder.

Those two projects have added onto the Donor Survey project and supporting the team with any other projects, but is extremely welcomed and make me feel even more apart of the team.

Hope everyone stays stress free unlike me.

See y’all in the next one!

Kennedy Smith