Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

An undercurrent of greetings and chatter rippled through the group of twelve ladies before me. As they began to settle into the office with their new folders and notebooks, a few attempted to speak with me. Drawing on one semester of Arabic, I managed to say أنا لا أتكلم; a phrase meaning, “I don’t know how to speak Arabic.” One of the older women, sitting in the back of the class chuckled, “You, too, learn. You teach me English, I teach you.”

After speaking with Dr. Lomax and my cohort of fellows in the program this week, I see how my view of leadership can transform my interactions within this Civics course. Traditionally, I would believe that my duty as a teacher is to provide the most knowledge for these women. I am challenging myself to break from this notion and take this as an opportunity to develop my own Arabic skills and teach these ladies in a way that is culturally relevant to them. I have begun this process with the older woman who spoke up in the class. When she comes in to the office, we often converse, her in one sentence of English and I in Arabic. I have found that working in this way mutualistically encourages us to improve our skills.

In addition to reforming the Civics curriculum, I have also been working on story-building for Muslim Family Services of Ohio. I am focusing on our email messaging. It has been interesting learning how to craft these narratives while maintaining the privacy and respect of our clients. I have also created a few new graphics for the events that are having.

Graphic for the produce event we hold every Thursday.

This week’s Learning Session topic surrounding Marketing was incredibly relevant to my own conversations at City Year. One idea that reverberated throughout the week from Natalie Parcher’s presentation was how storytelling and catering to diverse (in age, but also lived experiences) audiences is crucial to accessing funds and resources for community work. As we saw in the session, it is important for a non-profit organization to centralize their message and what their brand is to increase visibility and communicate better with their respective audiences.

This week at City Year, I was able to observe a Development meeting with the rest of the Managing Development Directors at the national level. Though the conversation was originally intended to focus on an event for donors, it soon shifted to the topic of marketing or branding. Most members on the call emphasized that although City Year is a national organization with 29 sites, there isn’t really a nationally recognized brand or general brand awareness like there is with other organizations such as Teach For America. While there was not a concrete solution or plan to solve the issues surrounding national branding at the meeting, this theme of branding and storytelling seems crucial in consideration of the work that City Year and other nonprofits do.

After I left that meeting with City Year, I had plenty of time to also consider what the role of the Development team is for non-profits like City Year. This also left me with some questions, such as:

• How do you build a consistent story for a national organization while also maintaining the unique stories of individual sites?
• In other words, how can City Year create a solid, recognizable national brand while keeping the emphasis on site-specific stories?

Needless to say, this is a very large conversation to continue long after this Fellowship ends but definitely one that I am interested in observing. Unfortunately, no pictures this week to share with folks, other than my attempt at social media engagement with some Canva art:

We’ll see what next week brings to City Year!

The beginning of week three felt very natural. Monday was spent doing remote work, with a quick zoom staff meeting the morning. After the staff meeting I designed more posts for our social media sites, and did investigating for our development area. 

On Tuesday, I was glad to be back in the office. I started the morning off with a partnership meeting for the pilot program, then transitioned into helping with a packing event. One project I am excited about is the Kiwanis Regatta Fundraiser, where I have been tasked to decorate the boat for the online race. Lastly, in the afternoon I worked on development with the executive director. 

Wednesday morning was spent in learning session 2 for the Columbus Foundation. It was really interesting learning about the marketing aspect of nonprofit work. It was fascinating learning more in depth about how marketing has transitioned into a more digital space. My Wednesday afternoon was spent working on more development pieces for the Family Mentor Foundation. 

On Thursday I spent the morning researching funding and grant opportunities, diving deeper into how corporations choose what organizations to fund and lend their support to. I’ve learned that researching corporate philanthropy opportunities is very important, because each corporation has its own values and preference to certain causes. 

My final day of the week started early, helping put buddy boxes into drivers’ cars for the weekend. Weekend feeding is especially important because kids do not have access to school resources during these days. In the afternoon I helped design our boat for the upcoming online Kiwanis Regatta event. This third flew by, with a lot of projects in the works and new opportunities to learn! As always, I’m looking forward to next week, and all the new experiences. 

I can’t believe another week has gone by! Now that I’m deep into my projects, I feel like the days are going quicker than I can keep track of. The main focus of this week has been creating a detailed task list with estimated dates of completion as well as updating some policies. Since I learned about environmental and nonprofit policies in my coursework at Ohio State, FLOW has tasked me with making recommendation on how to update their policies. Mainly, they want to develop a strong Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Statement that reflects the needs of the communities they serve. While I am certainly not qualified to speak on the full extent of the injustices in the Columbus area, I am excited to help develop a plan to have Columbus residents involved in the decision-making process at FLOW. Our conversations about advocacy, activism, empowerment, and representation during group learning sessions with The Columbus Foundation have been inspiring. While I am not the expert, I feel confident that we can develop a plan to increase FLOW’s ability to contribute to social change. Sustainability and conservation efforts have been historically white-washed due to the privilege of those involved. However, climate justice is not possible without social justice, so it should be a part of FLOW’s mission to combat environmental and social injustices.

A fun opportunity I had this week was to attend Moth Night hosted by Ohio Lepidopterists. Located at Sawmill Wetlands, the same area we watered trees and removed invasives at last week, they set up bright lights, blacklights, and white sheets to attracts all kinds of moths and nightcrawlers. As Sawmill Wetlands continues through the restoration process, it’s important to monitor the native species to see how they thrive or improve. FLOW’s projects will continue to increase the tree canopy and native plant species in the area. Just from the one hour I spent there between 10-11pm, we observed several species of moths that are important to the biodiversity of Ohio ecosystems. It brought me so much joy to hear the group talk about something they are so passionate about.

This weekend, I have a few events to look forward to! On Saturday, I will be attending a clean-up at the Worthington Tree Nursery as well as a bridge-building event at Slyh Run near Cranbrook Elementary. The small bridge will connect the school and neighborhood to a beautiful pollinator garden. On Sunday, a Girl Scouts Brownie troop is coming to a clean-up! I’m looking forward to interacting with more of the public at these events. Talk to you next week! -Shelly

This week was a week that felt familiar in the way that we’ve come accustom to experiencing, contact tracing. My roommate had taken a trip to Nashville with her friends this past weekend and upon coming back didn’t have a strong sense of smell or taste. So, like we all know, I had to wait for her test to come back before I could return to work. Because of that, my week started on Wednesday.

All in all, this week has been just like any other week. We have our really busy periods, and our really quiet periods.

The highlight of my week however was when the OSU Aphasia group came in for their weekly hour and a half of volunteering as a group. This week was a special occasion because one of the members was there for her last group session before she moved to Tennessee. Though I didn’t know her very well, it was obvious that she was an important part of the group based on the other members reactions to her saying her goodbyes. After some doughnuts and laughs, we got them to work. Since most of them aren’t able to do two handed activities like you and I might, we have to get creative with the things they do while they are here volunteering. So this week I had them tracing and cutting out bird bodies and wings for our pride event. They actually did really well they cut out 50 bird bodies and 100 wings in an hour between the 5 of them. It’s truthfully very rewarding to work with them and see the things they do. These people could easily choose to take the hand they’ve been dealt and not fight against it, but instead they choose to get up, come to the center, laugh and joke around, work hard, and never complain. It’s inspiring to say the least.

For more information about the OSU Aphasia Initiative see the link below:

https://sphs.osu.edu/clinic/aphasia

• This week I was able to start working on finalizing the details on a project I will be working on for the rest of the summer. I was excited to start working on helping ROX in areas of my interest. I made a detailed plan about how I was going to complete this project. I went into detail about eight goals. My first goal was to reach out to legislators in Educational and Financial Committees to inform them about ROX. I will also be reaching out to congressional members with inner city school districts. Thirdly, I will reach out to members in leadership positions in various organizations to see how ROX can pair or work with them. Fourthly, I want to identify the most successful strategies to make a legislative tool kit in other states. Another goal of mine is to research information about girl’s well-being and use key statistics from ROX research to communicate the necessity of ROX. Sixthly, I will need to research how to communicate effectively with congressional members and people in leadership positions. I will also try to find additional resources for ROX from places such as the Department of Education. Lastly, I will try to find school districts that ROX programs could be most sustainable in. 
• I was able to have lunch with the other interns at ROX and it was nice to sit down and share about our experiences, takeaways, and what we had learned so far.  I really appreciated being able to have a conversation focused on how our different interest drives us to unite for a bigger cause. 
• I had lunch with two people on staff in ROX. The first was the Program Manager. It was extremely interesting to hear her journey in social work and nonprofits. During our conversation, I was able to discuss questions about social work and how it played a role in nonprofits. Furthermore, it was inspiring to hear how she was drawn to do work to support and help girls. The second person I met with was the Executive Assistant. It was also interesting to hear her journey to ROX. She went into detail about her experience at ROX and how welcoming the community has been to her. I definitely would love to work somewhere, in the future, that has a culture like ROX. 

This week at Equitas, I have gained experience in working with JotForm submissions from artists. I have continued my project of putting the art work in easy to view binders and documents, but as I have done so, I have started to learn a lot about the central Ohio art scene. One artist that has really stood out to me is Barb Vogel. We are using her work on our invitations and marketing for the event, as she is the longest donating artist to the art for life event! I love seeing her work, which she describes as “clickless images created from a hand-held wand scanner” made with encaustics (wax). Her work so beautiful to look at and work with; it makes me excited for the upcoming Art for Life event and all the work that has gone into it.

Speaking of all the work that has gone into the event, this week I was able to sit in on a meeting with the Steering Committee for art for life. With discussions ranging from big events, such as scheduling the gallery at the Columbus Museum of Art, to the small details, like deciding between paddles and program for the auction, their meetings were super interesting to participate in and learn how much planning really goes into an event for it to be successful. So many volunteers put time and effort months in advance of this event to help us raise money for such an important cause.

Another (seemingly unimportant, but truly life changing) discovery this week was the café in the basement of our building! Those tater tots for only 90 cents have made late Wednesday afternoons in the office 300% better, for both the snack, and the walk downstairs to get it.

The week started with the fellows getting together in person for picture day due to a 100% vaccination rate! When I first applied for this position, it seemed unlikely that any of the experience would be in-person. However, getting to finally meet all the fellows in-person was extremely exciting and somewhat surreal. I feel so lucky that I am able to go in for work every day.

Last week during the Summer Fellow orientation, Dr. Lomax asked us to draw a self portrait of ourselves to illustrate the most important aspects of ourselves and our lives.  I would not describe myself as a creative person. Thus, knowing this task would require some artistic creativity, I felt defeated before I even began to draw and knew that my drawing would not turn out well.

However, this week at Netcare, I learned to embrace my creative side. Many times this week I had to use my written, artistic, and cognitive creativity. I worked to design social media posts for the upcoming month of July, I began to write and design the July Connections Newsletter, and I had to think outside the box on several occasions as we prepared for the Golf Fundraiser. Through all these tasks, I learned how exciting it is, even if creativity is not my strong suit, to be able to have the ability to grow this inventive side of myself. 

As we prepared for the Golf Fundraiser, I received a fun piece of advice… “It is okay if things go wrong with an event, just as long as the guests do not know.” As I look to next week, the Golf Fundraiser is Monday. Since this will be the first fundraising event that I helped to run, I look forward to being able to continue to use my newfound sense of creativity to help the event run as seamlessly, as possible. 

Monday

As we are entering our second week, it was nice to be able to meet all of the other Fellows in person. Everyone was lovely and I look forward to seeing them during our excursions! While at the Craft Museum, this week is our first week of art camp. We had an extensive list of students ranging from ages 6-12 come in to complete different projects with myself and the other teachers. It was a bit nerve racking getting prepared for everything to start, once we met the kids and our day got started, it all fell into place. 

Early on in the week we found out one of the teachers was sick and not able to come in. This left me with being the one who would step in and I’d have to teach 4 classes a day by myself. This thought is a little daunting but I’m always up for a challenge and have no issues with the extra responsibility. I’m quite looking forward to it actually. I will be doing a felting project and teaching the students about embroidery. This will be my first time doing both of these things seriously and it will be interesting to see how all of this will work out. I’m very excited!

Friday

    Today was my last official day of teaching for the 1st week. It was extremely fun! I was able to form many connections with all of the kids and we had some interesting conversations. It was nice being able to offer them a different teaching structure than what they were used to. They seem to have really enjoyed themselves!

Today, I had the privilege of joining the CMLF development team for an in-progress tour of the new Karl Road branch library. This library is under construction and due to be completed in the next several months. It is being built at the same location as the previous branch, but this new building will offer some amazing new spaces and resources for the Northland community.   

As we toured, we talked about how the new space was designed for the people of the Northland community and has added features such as new study rooms, dedicated programming spaces, and space for interactive technology. We envisioned the addition of local artists’ work that has been commissioned for the space and admired the natural light and openness throughout. My colleagues also spoke about how exciting it will be to attend the branch opening. They talked about past openings where community patrons walk into the new space and are overwhelmed to the point of tears. It was a reminder to me that while our physical connection to the library may have been on pause for much of this past year, the emotional connection we have to our libraries, the resources they provide, and the community they foster continues. 

This notion of libraries as so much more than books and concrete spaces kept arising this week. And, it’s true, the digital and community services of the library are not confined within our walls. But, I also know what a safe haven the physical library can provide. So, it’s exciting to see CML’s investment in these community spaces as libraries for the future.  

It’s only week 2, but I can feel the pace of summer quickening. Over the next couple weeks I will venture out to more of our branches and meet more people who love their libraries. This love is where I’m finding joy right now. 

Till next week,  

Amy