Fellow Blog Post – Week 2
June 17, 2024
Hello everyone!
My name is Gia An Thach and I am one of the Columbus Foundation’s summer fellows this year. The summer fellowship program at the Columbus Foundation places eligible students with Franklin County nonprofit organisations for a 10-week period. The fellowship program allows students to receive experience at their host sites, while nonprofits benefit from the additional support the we provide. I am so excited to be spending my summer at Bridgeway and cannot wait to update you all on my experience through this blog every week!
Here is how my second week as a fellow went:
As I continue creating content for our summer program, I’m excited to be picking up new skills such as photo editing and color grading videos to fit the scene of the event I’m filming. However, I want to think of different ideas of the content that I could make and share. I’ve noticed that if similar content gets posted repeatedly, people will start to lose interest and engage less with the post. One goal that I want to accomplish during my fellowship is to apply storytelling to my content. I graduated from OSU with a journalism degree so I learned so many ways to tell a narrative. I want to use that knowledge to share the many impactful stories that I see and hear about at Bridgeway.
Above are some pictures that I have taken to be posted on Bridgeway’s social media channels!
One idea that I have is a photojournalism project that shows the relationship between students and staff. From working at Bridgeway so far, I notice that the staff have a deep love for the students and that love is shown in different ways. Not only do I want to capture moments of joy that students and staff experience, I also want to capture the more difficult moments that are able to be managed because of the support and love that students and staff have for one another.
Lastly, I had a chance to work on one of the fundraising campaigns the advancement team was working on. Bridgeway is one of the organizations selected by Governor Sherrod Brown’s office to potentially receive funding from the federal government to renovate the building. The project now has to be approved by the Senate Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation, Housing and Urban Development. This week, I helped in creating a one page overview of our project to be presented to a legislative aid. I created a draft for my mentor to go in and edit. I also helped to design it so that our organisation stands out to the subcommittee. I was proud that I was able to help on a campaign that would potentially provide the organisation with a large amount of funding needed to complete the project. Though my writing could be tweaked and improved upon, I was grateful to be able to help with it and want to be able to work on similar projects in the future.