(no subject)
Yesterday, one of my "colleagues" left the Y to move to Yosemite. He and his family bought a market and will be operating it. It seems to be very fitting for this guy. In my work role, I support 26 locations in fund development strategy and therefore grant writing, if they accept the support. This particular guy led our Antelope Valley/Lancaster location and sometime almost exactly a year ago, I helped him on a grant proposal. I usually am not that deeply involved with our branch proposals but I stay afloat on emails and make sure everyone has what they need to keep going. We have a consultant who, for all intents and purposes, is a Y staff member, whose team supports our branches for individual grant proposals (usually $5-20k). I'm not sure why or how I stepped in but this branch's executive director preferred to deal with me. He asked for calls, and so I made time for calls. We usually opened up the documents and literally went line by line for both budgets and narratives. It was fine. I understand that some people have different working styles. Sometime in the summer, I think, I went out to his branch, mostly because I wanted to eventually visit all of the 26 locations spread from Lancaster to San Pedro, and this was one of the branches I'd yet to visit. Plus, my schedule is pretty flexible, which isn't to say that I'm not busy, but I have the flexibility to prioritize my tasks and work wherever needed to get what I need to get done. Every year, each branch who would like additional funds from our office also submits a request, which he asked for support to complete, which I basically drafted based on conversations with him. I asked for approval to support him but I also really helped because he simply just asked me. The "line officer," who really didn't support our department prior, made sure to thank me personally, and the guy made sure to let me know that he let my entire higher-ups know how much he appreciates me. I thought it was business as usual but I did, and do, appreciate his appreciation and expression of that. Right before he left, we talked on the phone and he once again drove the point home that I am the embodiment of what support is, that I work with people where they're at, and I make things easy to understand and accomplish. I hope to visit him in Yosemite!
The other night or morning, while lucidly sleep-dreaming, I thought about this and went back into my brain and past. I was also thinking about this Catalyst program I'm in and probably was thinking about my upcoming deliverables TBH. Anyway, I went back to 2012'ish, when I was probably bored, received an email from my department about an opening for a Research Assistant, applied, missed my interview call, went in for an interview and sort of started that day, and stayed for the next 4 years. I was actually hired for a Catalyst project! Those funds were very little, but all the little grants added up, and they really needed me towards the end of my grad program, which led to my full-time hiring! I learned how to "fish for my dinner" and continue to support grants where I wrote myself in them and continued the work to stay employed. The doctor who hired me worked in the Emergency Department AND primary care clinic AND the Research & Innovation office where they gave me a desk, and then another desk, then another desk. Eventually, I did leave because of the hostile work environment after he left, but I will always remember him and his work style. We would often have walk-and-talk meetings, or I would walk up to the Emergency Dept or find him in the back of the primary care clinic on his computer, or the cage where the doctors ate, or basically in some tiny area where he could open his laptop. I learned to literally meet people where they're at! I really thought that was just, as I said, business as usual. I became used to this even with the teams I worked with later, meeting at the trailer offices, driving to South LA to screen patients for pre-diabetes, and those were my days. While I'm mostly in my office now, that mentality stands.
This improvisation and flexibility is pretty vital it seems, especially now, and I'm glad this is how I've done it all along. If I wasn't ever exposed to sugar, would I even know any other world?
-human catalyst