Walking for a Smile
Changing lives one smile at a time
Investigation
I have been part of the Operation Smile club in my school for over two years. I know the club very well and especially how the fundraisers work. Because of this, I decided to do, along with 5 other peers that also are part of the club a big fundraiser for the club. Based on the idea of uniting volunteers from different schools around Lima fighting for the same cause, we decided to do a "sponsored run" where participants would be sponsored and the money bet would go to Operation Smile.
Before deciding on this, we needed to investigate a lot on what our target audience was. Francesca, the club president, talked to other representatives of other schools and asked them what strategies they had previously used to fundraise. Based on that, we decided to do a big event on the soccer field at the school where we would bring food trucks and entertainment aside from the sponsored run. Based on this, we started to move foward and pitch the idea to Ms. Smith, who liked it and told us to talk to the Middle School since they already had a sponsored run.
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After this, we have already decided who will do what and are moving on to the planning of the project.
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The learning outcomes I pursued in the investigation of my CAS Project were:
3. Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.
5. Demonstrate skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
6. Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.
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Planning
The planning of my CAS project is divided between 6 people. It's great that we did it in a relatively big group because it takes a lot of work.
The first thing was to set a date which ended up being hard. The date had to fit the Operation Smile national organization's needs as well as the school's availability. It was initially going to be in September when we had two weeks to plan, but not everyone was on board to that date. Honestly, I think it would've been better because all of us were a lot less busy back then. That's something I would change about the process, I would do it back in September when we got more time to plan. Since we couldn't do it in September, the next available date was October 27th and we stuck by it. We had the whole month to plan, but we didn't use it. That is by far the greatest mistake of the project. I was very busy studying for my admission exams and didn't give it my best attention and neither did the other members of the group. When we realized, we only had a week to plan for it. We did our best within that week; we delegated tasks for each one, bought decorations, talked to Ms. Patiño to be the spokesperson in the event, and asked for the materials in the school. What we missed was advertising the event properly. We posted on social media and talked to the presidents of other school's clubs but since the date was so close, we didn't have time to insist. Only FDR members came.
The learning outcomes I pursued in the planning of my CAS Project were:
1. Identify own strengths and develop areas of growth.
3. Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.
5. Demonstrate skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
6. Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.
Demonstrate
Reflection
The strength of the CAS project was, by far, the persistence of the members of the day of the event. It went nothing as we planned. A lot of things went wrong. Not as many people as we expected came, we didn't win as much money with the run as we expected, and the people weren't as cheered up as we wanted them to be. However, we maintained our positive attitude and persisted on trying to win money the way we could. For instance, there were parents watching their kids play soccer. Even though the event ended early, we stayed there until soccer finished so we could sell them food and ask for donations. In that way, we were able to still gather donations even though the event didn't go as planned.
For next time, I would give more attention to the advertising of the event and wouldn't do a sponsored walkathon because it's hard to organize the sponsors outside of the school. I would also ask for companies to sponsor us, for instance, Gatorade, so we can grab more attention to the event. In general, I would extend the planning to more time because the time we had was definitely not enough.
The learning outcomes I pursued in my CAS Project experience were:
1. Identify own strengths and develop areas of growth:
We made crucial mistakes in the project and the lack of planning is always something that stresses me out and I give up on working on it. However, this experience allowed me to maintain the work mindset and still try to solve the problem if it didn't go as planned.
2. Demonstrate that challenges were undertaken developing new skills in the process.
As I mentioned, our main challenge was the fact that we planned the project in little time and not many people came. Consequently, we didn't get the amount of money we planned. Still, we were able to overcome that.
3. Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience.
We did a very good job at the beginning of planning which shows how to start a CAS experience. However, we didn't execute it as we should have.
4. Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences.
The lack of commitment was definitely an issue throughout the process. However, on the day of the event itself, the commitment of the club members was clear because everyone was trying to solve the problem of the event as well as out perseverance to gather as many donations as we could.
5. Demonstrate skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively.
The collaboration was lacking and I understood the benefits of working collaboratively because we didn't have that in the CAS experience. Not everyone did what they were supposed to do and because of that, Francesca and I, who were extremely busy with admission exams had to do the great majority of the work and the time we had wasn't enough.
6. Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance.
Operation Smile is an extremely important organization worldwide and even though we didn't get the amount of money we initially planned, we did our best to win the most we could considering the problems we faced.
7. Recognize and consider the ethics of choices and actions.
I recognize that we needed to plan the event for more time and I consider that wasn't the best choice to make. However, it's also important to recognize that once I realized the problem, I did my best to solve it.
