This year the East Campus celebrated its tenth anniversary on UWC Day, a day where all the UWC campuses around the world come together to celebrate the UWC goals, mission, and values. I am currently part of the Service Executive Committee, as well as a focus group called Voices for Refugees. This was a great opportunity for me to participate and help plan the event. Here is my reflection of the work we did leading up to the event, as well as the day itself.
In Service Exec, we worked on incorporating service into the celebration. The theme for the day was “Inspiring Change”, so we decided to focus on that. We decided to spread the ‘cows’ ( the huge black rectangular things that you can write on with chalk) out around the plaza, and ask people to answer, in chalk, one question: “How do you inspire change?”. We also set up a photo booth with the SDGs, and we also invited the focus groups to join in and create activities of their own for the day.
Voices for Refugees was also invited to participate in UWC day. After a brainstorming session, we decided to host a few activities and games. We also decided to ask participants about refugees, to see what they knew so we could target the right myths and spread the right information and awareness later in the year.
The event was great fun! There were many performances, and the atmosphere of the event was also great. Unfortunately, there wasn’t as much of a focus on service and the focus groups as we had hoped for. This was partly because most people were focused on the performances, and didn’t have the time to see the stalls the focus groups had set up.
However, that being said, this was the first time we were able to incorporate Service during the event. We were also able to garner some support and enthusiasm during the event, and quite a few people who participated in the activities by the focus groups learnt a lot from them. Looking forward to next year’s UWC Day!