I have the immense privilege of working with talented, driven, funny colleagues who are passionate about Ohio and its communities. I have so much appreciation for what they do for GOPC and the state, and I wanted to publicly acknowledge how grateful I am to work alongside them. 

There are too many things to list in one blog, but one overarching item I’m thankful for, is how hard my colleagues work to make GOPC’s public-facing work so polished and effective. Here’s a few “behind the scenes” I’m particularly appreciative of.

Jason Warner and Aaron Clapper have been an unstoppable team while advocating for brownfields funding, and now in disseminating information about the new Brownfields Revitalization Fund program. It’s astonishing how quickly they can turn half-baked ideas into effective action. In the summer, we kicked around the idea of setting up a clearinghouse website. Within 24 hours (no joke, 24 hours!) they had www.ohiobrownfields.com built and ready to launch. This is how they roll all.the.time. with our brownfields work. Amazing.

Aaron brings a white-glove approach to various coalitions and communities of practice that he manages for GOPC. His ability to serve our partners with such personalized responses and support is critical to the organization’s success.

Jason always has his finger on the pulse of Capital Square. That type of knowledge helps us stay prepared for the next proposed policy change and helps us keep our local partners informed. As a policy organization, this type of constant information collection and sharing is essential.

Erica Spaid Patras is so methodical in approaching and guiding a project to completion. She regularly reminds the rest of us that we don’t need to boil the ocean, and that we can, instead, focus our energies on the activities that will have the greatest impact. Her reminders keep us from frustrating ourselves with wasted energy and time.

The necessary pain of every nonprofit is grantwriting. Every year, Erica drafts and contributes to a lot of grant applications and scopes of work. Her ability to break down a project into clear steps and desired outcomes, all within designated character limits is a skill that saves everyone else’s sanity and helps keep the lights on at GOPC.

GOPC would have gone out of business years ago if not for Meg Montgomery’s scrupulous financial management.  She is the brake to my spendthrift gas. She always asks the right questions about the cost/benefits of every purchase and tenaciously negotiates our service and utilities contracts to shockingly low rates.

Meg has also taught me so much about financial managing a company. My background is not nonprofit management and it still shows. Meg’s patient tutelage, which continues to this day, has taught me how to read and analyze our financial documents, which has been especially important over the last two years.

Lindsey Elam has pushed GOPC to rethink how we collects feedback from residents in our neighborhood-based projects. We’ve started to incorporate her suggestions in existing work and I am excited to bring more of her ideas into future projects. Community engagement is always hard and has been particularly difficult during Covid; I am grateful that Lindsey has identify solutions to these situational challenges, as well as the bigger-picture challenges that all interview-based projects face.     

Lindsey and Maria Walliser-Wejebe design their own long-form reports (and a lot of other material for GOPC as well) and the reports always look so professional.  Bringing graphic design in-house saves GOPC so much money. And time.  It is such a relief to not have to budget two or three weeks for a designer in the final stages of a project and know that the design will perfectly match the tone and themes in the report. This seems like a small thing, but it really isn’t.

Maria spent months this past year pouring through public records to help us understand how funding flows from a state agency to regional and local partners.  Her meticulous research helped confirm what we knew at a gut level and raised even more questions for us. That type of patience and perseverance is just what a policy nonprofit needs.

And lastly, Maria and Jason write the lion’s share of our #GOPCThreads on twitter. It can take several hours to craft a well-researched thread that’s easy to read and has clever gifs. If it’s a thread with an A+ gif game, you know one of them developed the thread.

I could go on and on, and probably will in a future blog. But for now, I’ll say thank you to my colleagues for making it so rewarding to work at GOPC!