Columbus Foundation Fellowship Programs

This week I wanted to share a story about the Vice President of Human Resources and Operations, and how tremendously this demonstrates the positive culture at my organization.

My first day at BBBS, I was introduced to Susan Murray. My supervisor told me that Susie would be my best friend for the day as I was working through paperwork, payroll, and policies. I could not have had a more welcoming first encounter with the organization, as Susie was bubbly and energetic and excited to get me started for the summer. This was really the only time I had spent with her to date until today.

Susie has been involved with BBBS for 48 years. She started as a camper at the BBBS owned and operated camp, Camp Oty’Okwa. She came to Central Ohio to be the office administrator before returning to camp to be a camp administrator. She has bounced around the organization, existing and enhancing the BBBS mission for nearly half a century. In fact, Susie loves BBBS so much that she actually got married at the BBBS camp. Her dedication to the mission of this organization is inspiring, and it was heartwarming to witness the staff surprise her today with an anniversary potluck lunch (her favorite!).

Two things became clear in light of the celebration held for Susie this afternoon. One was that this is the type of organization people WANT to be a part of for 10, 20, 30, or even 48 years. Much of the staff has worked with the organization in one capacity or another for an extended period of time, and people hardly ever leave. It’s clear to me they are doing something right here. The culture, the mission, the passion, everything BBBS is keeps the staff involved and committed. The second thing that became clear is the amount of care this staff has for one another. This is a busy time of year for the staff. Everyone came together, cleared their schedules for the afternoon, and each contributed a food or drink item, while also considering Susie’s preferences. You will not find this type of generosity at every organization, and I am grateful that I have found it here.

Something that has kind of been a challenge for me is balancing all of my commitments this summer. On top of my fellowship position with Best Buddies/The Columbus Foundation, I am enrolled in six online course for my two masters programs (and have a part time job) and it is taking some time to adjust to having such a heavy workload. However, as I am delving deeper into my coursework and am contributing more to the Best Buddies Ohio Team, I see that there are a lot of connections between all of my commitments and that if I focus on these overlaps I’m able to balance everything in a more efficient way. 

More specifically, I am enrolled in four different social work course for my Masters of Social Work program at OSU, each of these courses has an emphasis on empowering clients, developing appropriate leadership qualities, and finding the best intervention/treatment services for various populations. Through these courses I feel like I am finding new ways to expand on my skill set as a social worker and truly carry out the mission of Best Buddies to empower individuals with an IDD, help facilitate intentional and positive relationships among clients (one-to-one friendships), and ultimately helping individuals develop their own leadership abilities.

Taking this new mindset, that everything has a purpose and a connection, has helped me to feel more fulfilled as both an intern and a student. While I am definitely still stressed over meeting deadlines and creating quality work, I am a little more confident in myself, knowing that I am growing personally and professionally through this heavy course load and that at the end of the day my experience as a fellow and student this summer are amplified by being both. 

The second week of my fellowship has flown by, and with it have come new figures, opportunities, and challenges. For one, my supervisor, House Chef Blair Arms, is back in the office from vacation. Chef Blair is an incredible woman. A trained pastry chef and former employee of OSU dining services, she’s extremely talented, approachable, and passionate about providing the best experience possible for her families and volunteers. This passion was made evident on Tuesday, where she spoke as one of eight Nationwide Children’s Hospital employees in their DiscoveryX series, a TED Talk style event where NCH staff present projects they have been working on. Blair was speaking about the Team Cuisine program.

Now that I am working with her every day, the pace is starting to pick up. I continued to send out grant applications to grocers and food processors, learned about Chef Blair’s basic budgeting, purchasing, and accounting processes, and of course, continued to take pictures and brainstorm volunteer stewardship programs for meal teams. Learning more about Blair’s values and constraints, I have a better idea of what to look for when finding a donor to cultivate a relationship with.

Another task I have been working on is linking data from Volgistics, the software RMHC uses to manage volunteers, and Raiser’s Edge, the software RMHC uses to manage donors. The goal is to be able to create standard impact reports that can be sent to corporate donors, stating things like “in 2018, x staff members volunteered at the house, serving x amount of meals and making x amount of blankets, for a total of x hours. Additionally, your contribution of x$ provided x nights of rest for families”. It’s interesting to me that these two datasets weren’t linked before, given the size of RMHC’s volunteer program.

Finally, I’m beginning to ease into friendships with my colleagues. I’m learning more about each person’s personality, hobbies, life pursuits, strengths, and stressors. Having that familiarity and network will help me feel more comfortable pushing boundaries and thinking “outside the box”. I’m excited for what comes next!

Hello readers!

This week was filled with learning and expanding my knowledge on how to reach an audience in which I am not as familiar. The week screamed of cultural competency and cultural humility for me. In order to truly learn, I realized I had to leave some traditional concepts I had in order to positively impact the children I plan to teach. In making the curriculum for our Bright Lights Summer Camp, I immersed myself into researching how to adequately teach and communicate with at-risk children. This research included scholarly work, educational videos, and on-site interviews. Within each method I learned a lot, but a few things stood out to me.

As noted in the previous post, Lower Lights Ministries offers many programs. A part of the many programs is their recovery program that includes housing. Two women from this program agreed to meet with me to tell me their stories and offer advice. I asked them if they could tell me something they wished an adult in their lives had mentioned to them while they were young. Both spoke about the importance of feeling safe. Safe enough to reach out to someone and talk about their lives. They also talked about how there are individuals pulling kids into detrimental environments. One of the women witnessed a man wrapping up drugs in wrapping paper and calling a young kid to his door. He told the kid to deliver a birthday present to a house on the same block for $2. The kid not knowing what was in the birthday present delivered the drug dealers ‘gift’. I was told that these are real situations that these kids could be in within this area and teaching them boundaries was extremely important. This incident might shock many but this is a common and realistic event in some areas. Although, there is potential danger anywhere, many children attending Lower Lights live in an area where anything deemed safe is not isolated from the by-products of an impoverished area. I was told by the staff that an outside Mailbox created for the neighborhood kids to grab books from had to be removed. It was removed because it was quickly turned into a drug drop-off zone. When kid-friendly concepts and environments are manipulated in this way it would be wrong to educate my class in a way that does not speak to their realistic needs.

My goal for the summer is to help give them the best tools to protect themselves and expose them to the many avenues they can take in life. I want them to know that there is another world out there waiting for them and that they have the power to get there.

See you next week!

Prior to this week, I had a completely different understanding of the word empowerment and what it means for nonprofit organizations; furthermore, how this relates to being a “leader.”
This week I was able to learn more about the personal story behind the establishment of Best Buddies International and see how it relates to each individual who volunteers or works for the organization. What many people don’t know is that the founder of Best Buddies International, Anthony Kennedy Shriver, is the son of Eunice Kennedy, the founder of Special Olympics, and the nephew of Rosemary Kennedy, a member of the famous Kennedy Family who was unknown to many because of her Intellectual and Developmental Disability (IDD). Best Buddies International was started because Anthony Kennedy Shriver used his position to be a leader and saw the importance of empowering individuals with IDD and providing them with close friendships to help them uncover their talents, capabilities and own leadership qualities.
This took me back to a discussion I had with my fellow Summer Fellows and what it means to be a “leader,” and that what one perceives as a leader will vary depending on perspective and position. Within my role with Best Buddies International, my perspective of a leader has shifted and I now see it as both someone who uses their position and does what they can to empower others and guide them to overcome obstacles and also as someone who is able to empower others by being an example overcoming obstacles of their own.

The staff of the McConnell Arts Center has been running on all cylinders this week as we head into our annual Arts Festival. We have over 100 artists coming in from all over the country (as far as Colorado, Florida, and one from California!), and hundreds of patrons coming to our sit over the next two days to view the booths. It’s our job at the MAC to make sure that everyone involved has a fantastic weekend. It’s been quite the learning opportunity for me in the world of arts administration. I thought that I understood the importance of planning ahead before this week, but I had no idea the level of preparation that was required for hosting an event like the one we’ve put together.  

On Wednesday, every staff member we have went out into the field with this insane PVC pipe contraption and painted each of the spots for the artist, sponsor, and community partner tents. I’m not sure I can even count the number of cans of spray paint we went through. On Thursday, I spent a good portion of my day cutting and hole punching laminated signs, putting together twenty-something cardboard trashcans, and putting little numbered flags in the field to match the spray-painted numbers, not to mention helping to finish the leftover tasks from cleaning up last week’s camp! We started the hard work today, though. After arriving early enough for the summer air to still be chilly, I helped to set up our information tent and put together even more signs to be spread out across the field to direct people toward the restrooms. Then I manned our information booth for a considerable amount of time to check in our artists, direct them to the proper loading and parking spots, and take care of any other concerns they might have, on top of managing a handful of other tasks throughout the day, like ensuring that each artists had their booth sign in the top left corner of their booth. (Fun fact: many artists have their own specific vision of where they would like the sign to go. Shocking, right?) One of the highlights of my day was getting to drive the golf cart around to check on the artists.  

My supervisor and me at the information booth, getting ready to check all the artists in!

As well as getting each of the artists checked in and set up, we also had to set up the Preview Picnic for this evening! The Preview Picnic is a ticketed fundraising event where patrons can come have food and drinks with the artists and the MAC staff, and get a first look at several of the booths before they are opened to the public tomorrow morning. We had to handle seating and caterers and musicians (oh my!), and we had to ensure that the artists staying for the picnic were ready in time. The event in the evening was a success, though, thanks to the hard work and preparation of the people who have been working with the MAC for much longer than I have. I was just glad I got to enjoy it with them! 

The mountain of tasks that I’ve had over the last few days is almost nothing compared to the to-do list of the other staff members and the Event Coordinator (my supervisor). I learned a lot about the kinds of details that go into event planning, especially the aspect of coordinating people to get the jobs done– delegation and patience are the two most important parts of working with groups of people.  Another thing that I learned was that no matter how much you prepare and how well you know your schedule, there will always be something that goes wrong. For example, the printer in our offices jammed this morning before we could get complete copies of our check-in lists printed. We ended up using a spare program to check in artists as a quick solve until we could get the official list.  

I head in again tomorrow bright and early for the first public day of the festival (9am-6pm, in case anyone’s interested), and I look forward to checking out the artwork, the food, and all of the problem-solving that goes with it. I hope I get to drive the golf cart again! 

Week 2 was quieter than last week now that classes have ended, but this week has been no less impactful. As I sat at Cristo Rey graduation this Saturday and watched the class of 2019 proudly walk across the stage, I couldn’t help but think back to my high school graduation. I remember a common notion from both friends and family was “graduating high school isn’t that big of an accomplishment, college is really what is hard.” Growing up as a white woman with college-educated parents in a quality school district, graduating high school and moving onto college was the expectation for me and most of my peers. Yet, this is not the case for all students, including many here in Columbus. Not realizing the luxury of a quality K12 education creates a dangerous mindset for people from middle-class communities like mine, as you can choose to ignore the reality that some students might not even make it to high school graduation due to their zip code, socioeconomic class, and other factors.

The thoughts that surfaced during Cristo Rey graduation came up again Wednesday morning during our Fellows Learning Session. We spent some time discussing how bias and privilege might affect our work this summer. For me, one bias I possess relates to the ease of college access in my community; I grew up knowing that college was attainable and always part of my life plans. By recognizing this one area of bias, I hope I can work this summer with greater awareness of the current state of education for Columbus students. Entering the non-profit sector with the recognition of my biases can elevate the work I do to build the capacity of the students I serve to succeed in their education.

I’m grateful to be working at Cristo Rey and witnessing one approach the Columbus community is taking to transform educational outcomes for students. The experiences this week at Cristo Rey and during our Fellows Learning Session have broadened my ideas of how to approach leadership and bias in the non-profit sector while pushing for social profit within the Columbus community. I’m looking forward to seeing how I can build upon these ideas this summer, especially next week when I have the chance to meet more students and work directly in the classroom during Cristo Rey summer school. See you soon!

My time at CND these past two weeks has been spent helping the staff prepare for Summer Day Camp to start on the 24th. I have been assigned the task of making sure all of the binders for the counselors are made before their arrival for training next Monday. It may not be the most exciting task to be assigned to but it is imperative that it is done before next week.

I have spent many hours printing, hole-punching, stapling, and organizing and I do it because I know that if I don’t, another staff member will have to take the time out of their day to do it, which brings down the productivity of the office as a whole. In the past, CND would have the counselors spend a whole day making their own binders. This was problematic for a number of reasons: counselors lose a day of training or lesson-planning when it is dedicated to organizing binders; the copier gets jammed often due to the high volume of papers being printed at the same time; and staff have to spend hours over the weekend before camp making sure that the binders have been organized correctly.

I wanted to work at CND this summer because I wanted to work with kids. So far this summer, I haven’t seen any kids and that’s okay. I know that the work I am doing now will be important in 10 days when 250 kids show up for camp. This experience so far has reinforced many concepts I have studied in school, including how important it is to make sure your organization is working as efficiently and effectively as possible to fulfill the mission and theory of change.

With that being said, I am very excited to meet all of the kids this summer. I will get to travel around to all of the different camps throughout the city to help with data collecting. I have also been assigned as an adult floater in CND’s camps, meaning I am there to fill the gaps when the counselors need it. I have been getting to know all of the staff and I already feel like a vital part of the team/family. I’m ecstatic to get this summer started but I am not ready to watch it fly by!

This week, I have been participating—primarily—in training and orientation sessions that will prepare me for my time with the kids for the next eight weeks. During the training, the facilitators have been encouraging the staff to reflect on the academic year of programming as well as prior camps from the summer which has been tremendously helpful. To me, though, everything is still quite abstract. We speak of hypothetical campers in terms of hypothetical scenarios.

When I think of these situations, I find myself trying to conceptualize the posed scenario through the lens of kids I know—a familiar frame to make sense of the information. I am a part-time sitter when I’m not at HFF so I am often exposed to kiddos of various ages and demographics. However, out of all my years of being a camp counselor and working with children, I haven’t consistently been exposed to kids from the hub of the city. I didn’t grow up in this space either, so I know that I can’t truly understand the kids’ lived experiences. Thankfully, the expertise of the faculty makes up for my current, perhaps, clumsy skills.

In fact, my favorite part of week two has been finally getting to meet the other staff at the Center, whether it be the teachers who will inhabit the classrooms, the administrators who are in charge of planning and facilitation, or my fellow kitchen staff.  There exists a harmony of personalities that contributes to a rapport among returning crew; their dynamic excites me as I imagine the kids thrown into the mix. I can tell that they are full of love for the campers which, in my opinion, trumps any other factors relevant to the success of the program.

During the training, the training facilitators have been encouraging the staff to reflect on the academic year of programming as well as prior camps from the summer which has been tremendously helpful. To me, though, everything is still quite abstract. We speak of hypothetical campers in terms of hypothetical scenarios.

In an effort to understand the program and the backgrounds of the kids who are participating, I’ve been asking many questions and verbally organizing information. I’ve noticed that this may come off as a bit overzealous compared to the other staff participating in the trainings. (I’m a naturally zealous person, but they don’t know that about me yet.) I can’t help but voice my curiosities: What will my days look like? How many kids per class? When does camp end? What will be the extent of my exposure to kids since my tasks exist first and foremost in the cafeteria? Where do I park? Among all the questions, I am silently wondering, where do I fit in here in order to create the most meaningful impact?

In my interaction with both the campers and the staff, I’m trying to learn and navigate effective ways for me to express myself authentically in this space. I have been thinking this week about the balance between ‘being myself’ and expressing my thoughts while learning and listening to those who have the expertise and lived experiences necessary to understand the kids more aptly.

Even though I may not be able to immediately relate to some of the staff or kids attending summer program, I am reminded by a mentor that everyone—both children and adults—want to be seen, heard, valued, and loved. As long as I work towards building good relationships and respecting the differences and similarities among the big Dowd family, I just know it’s all going to work out.

COUNTDOWN TO CAMP: 3 DAYS!

After just nine days working at the GIAC, I’m surprised at how “settled in” I already feel. I finally figured out which keys unlock which doors, I’ve answered a few phone calls, and yesterday I only had to ask once where to find something! I know gaining more and more independence will be critical as the summer goes on and I navigate the GIAC’s summer camp, educational programs, board meetings, and so much more.

But before I write about how I gained confidence in my role at the GIAC this week, I also learned a lesson in taking accountability when I unfortunately missed the Fellows’ Learning Session on Nonprofit Career Paths due to no one’s fault but my own. I’m still having a hard time with this because I am fully committed to and grateful for the opportunity to be here this summer, and I recognize that missing an important session or event that other people have worked hard to put together does not send that message of commitment and gratitude. Transparency and openness are really important values of mine, and so I’ve realized that all I can do in situations like this where I messed up is to be honest, sincere, and not make that same mistake again. I’m hoping that I can grow in forgiving myself and giving myself room to be accountable throughout this summer, because this will certainly not be the last time in my life I mess up.

So, having that said, this week was full of new opportunities to see what the GIAC does in our communities. On Sunday, we hosted an art show featuring the work of a local photographer, and we had about fifty to sixty people all show up. Along with another staff member, my main role was to help serve light snacks and wine, but in doing so I had some pleasant conversations with the attendees. By the end of the show, about twenty people were all sitting in our lounge area and chatting away, and it warmed my heart to see the GIAC as a place that people can connect and re-connect.

Since Monday morning, the GIAC has been incredibly busy and I have really seen how the staff here have each other’s backs. One of our educators had her baby a month earlier than expected this week, so now we are down to five full-time staff members for the rest of the summer. Next week begins our two-week summer camp, and so everyone has been running around to get ready for that and take on some additional roles in our educator’s absence. I’ve been filling the hummingbird feeders this week because that was something she always did, and otherwise I have spent much of my spare time at the GIAC preparing for camp by searching for supplies, ordering and picking up books, planning activities, going over emergency procedures, and more.

In the midst of all the planning and organizing going on, the GIAC also hosted five educational programs this week. I got to lead an indoor scavenger hunt on Tuesday and Wednesday morning, and then I helped out with a fun game about bird migration today! It was really fun to work with different age groups and think about different ways to present the information to them, and I gained a lot of confidence in my leading and educating skills after just a few sessions. Today, I also got to help out with a Scouts of America program towards the Scouts’ achievement of their Environmental Science badges. We conducted experiments on air, soil, and water pollution while also going on a hike and a scavenger hunt. The Scouts had a lot of energy and enthusiasm, and I had a great time doing science with them!

So overall, week 2 was a busy but exciting week full of new experiences and seeing the GIAC’s impact throughout our communities and among people of all ages! I’m really looking forward to all the fun, nature-themed activities at camp next week, such as making our own suncatchers, playing a turtle conservation game, and finding as many birds as our eyes can see!

Have a great weekend, everyone! (:

Kenzie