20th Anniversary

This August marks the 20th Anniversary of Ohio Proud! To celebrate this we will be visiting 20 different partners and will be putting together a tour video to show the different aspects and diversity of Ohio Proud. We went on our first tour visit on Wednesday. We visited Rhoads Farm, located in Circleville Ohio. During this visit we sat down with the owner and asked her different questions about her business (i.e. how long they have been in business, what product they have, where they are located, etc). We then went and looked at their farm. They grow different produce items including sweet corn, black berries, cherries, and peaches. It was a great learning experience to see what all they do and also learn how to shoot videos properly so the video director at ODA can with it later. We really wanted to have all of these tours done before state fair so we could premiere the video then but that probably won't happen. But just getting this opportunity to do this is amazing. We will hopefully have them all done before my internship is over :)

Signs, signs, and more signs

This week we are finally getting every thing nailed down for Ag is Cool. Between myself and the other intern we have almost all the signs made up and have finished the volunteer manual and surveys. Neither one of us have really used publisher before to make signs so that was a little learning curve but we made it through in one piece. And now have some amazing signs :)

We know just have to go pick everything up in July and we have a meeting Monday with everyone else involved with Ag is Cool. By looking through the teacher surveys last year we found we had some issues, so by meeting up we're hoping we can fix everything and make it a great fair!

We also had our first conference call/webinar for the 2011 Specialty Crop Block Grant Recipients. I have never been involved in a conference call or webinar so we had to sign up a couple days early to make sure it would work. It went pretty well, we had a couple glitches but eventually got every thing worked out. We will have one more this coming week and then start working on the 2012 recipients.

Don't forget to wash your hands :)

This week I've been starting the different signs used for Ag is Cool. Never had to be creative and make signs like these, so I was very nervous about doing this. I have also never used Publisher before, so it too me a few tries to figure out what I could do. Overall I think I did a pretty good job, could be viewed as amateurish but I'll take it :) I am going to post one of them which will also give a little tease about what we're going to have in our tent this year.

Practice makes perfect?

I was never much of a writer, even in high school. Of course just like almost every other college student I can pull a 5 page research paper out of my you know what. But creative writing or blogging, anything where I have to be creative, means trouble for me. It's always been like that for me and I've muddled through, just barely getting by and I'm alright with that. As much as I wish I was a great writer, I understand that I have other strengths.
This week though really brought out my writing weakness. I had to write multiple mass emails for different events (ughh). My boss gave me all the information for each email and I pounded it out until I thought that I was done. I sent them to my boss to look over and overall I did alright! Of course she made a couple changes and added some things that I didn't know about and I emailed them out today :) I'm actually kind of proud of myself, because even though I'm not the best writer I am getting better! Throughout the rest of this internship I will hopefully be writing a lot more (blogs, newsletter, emails). All of this will hopefully give me the practice I need to become a better writer. And of course I understand that I probably won't be writing best selling novels anytime in my lifetime. But hopefully I will eventually be able to write something worth reading, without a lot of editing :)