Spring is a time for renewal as we tidy up from the chaos of the holiday season and new year. As we get older, Spring Break can tend to feel less and less like a break, but we can still do a bit of both. Here on the Campus of Caring we spent our Spring Break cleaning up with help from some hardworking students and throwing our campus a Spring Break Lawn Party!
This month we renewed a time-honored event for the Glasser/Schoenbaum campus - the OSU Student Spring Break. This is a wonderful program where our campus hosts students from The Ohio State University's Fisher College of Business for a week of community service and learning. These students focus in different sectors of business but come together through Fisher College's community service organization, FisherCares. It’s a connection we’ve had for many years, as two of our co-founders, Alex and Betty Schoenbaum, met while attending the university. Their gift to the college ensured that this relationship would continue even after their passing. Each year, FisherCares sends a group of passionate students from the business school to spend their Spring Break with us, giving back to the community and learning about the nonprofit field.
The group worked with our staff as well as partner agencies both on and off campus. Our maintenance team, Marian Haupt and Tyler Laughlin, supervised the students as they removed leftover debris from Hurricane Ian to keep our campus beautiful. These volunteering opportunities of course would not be complete without our campus agencies and off campus partners who hosted the students to help with tasks that keep nonprofits going. Our students worked with and learned from organizations like Children’s Guardian Fund, UnidosNow, Centerplace Health, and Children First. As they went about their tasks, the students continued the FisherCares tradition of passion and professionalism. They not only gave their time and energy to the various causes throughout the week, but gave an encouraging reminder of what the future can hold when our next generation is involved in the work we do to better our world. Each year that this program has continued, we’re able to reexamine our work through a fresh perspective as we hear opinions and questions we might not have otherwise considered. In this way, the week was educational for both ourselves and the students.
These students had the drive to tackle any task they met, but they also had the passion and curiosity to learn more about the field these organizations are in. So throughout the week our team organized and moderated a series of guided discussions with panels made up of professionals from various socially conscious organizations either directly or indirectly involved in nonprofit work. Discussions covered topics like the similarities between nonprofit and for-profit organizations, the roles played by foundations in the community, cross-sector collaboration, and communicating one's mission within changing political climates. These guided discussions provided context for how their volunteer work supports nonprofits on a larger scale, and gave students an opportunity to find out more about what it takes to create and maintain a mission-driven organization. As it often came up in these discussions, nonprofits are businesses as well; a relevant message that the students can carry with them, regardless of what industries they choose to work in.
Of course, no Spring Break would be complete without some fun in the sun, and the OSU crew jumped right in to help set up the decorations, entertainment and games! We treated our campus to a Spring Break Lawn Party with some delicious and well-deserved barbecue from Nancy's Bar-B-Que. With beautiful weather, the event was held both outside and inside with games like Cornhole and Kan Jams. Inside everyone got a chance to win Brunch Bucks courtesy of First Watch, at our Early Bird Raffle where staff could guess the number of paper cranes and make some of their own. The games and food are a treat but the real event of the day was seeing all the smiling faces from our partners. The Campus of Caring did what they do best and made the day a true "coming together" for our visiting students and our community.
Real estate is one of the greatest costs in a business budget. Our partnership with The Glasser/Schoenbaum Human Services Center allows more money to go towards our mission. And what better place to house our office than on a campus with nineteen other outreach agencies.
Collaboration is key to the success of our work. The Campus of Caring is a unique space where we can easily join forces with other agencies to make the best use of our resources and maximize our community impact. The affordable rent allows us to allocate more funds to our mission of transforming the lives of students and their families.
As a small organization with a staff of two, employee safety was a big consideration when we were looking for office space. We did not want our employees to be in a place where they were alone. Being on the GSHSC campus has been great because there is a whole community of like-minded professionals.
