As the co-chair of the focus group Voices for Refugees, I have been spending quite a lot of time planning for the event we hold every year, Write for Rights. Planning for an event like this is stressful, because there are so many different people to talk to and so many materials and resources we need to organise. Having a leadership team has been really great because we are all working together to try and divide up the tasks. My aim this year as co-chair was to improve at communicating with people I don’t know, so I tried to take some responsibility for things like emailing the facilities department at school. I find myself getting nervous about communicating formally with people so it was good that I kind of forced myself to improve at that.
Being organised has been super important, so google docs has been really helpful. We had to make a detailed plan of everything we needed to achieve. This was really important, as it meant we knew what we were approaching and made sure we weren’t missing out on any crucial parts. For example, although it seems less important, making sure to order lots of pens is really important, since this is a 24 hour writing event. Making the plan was also important to know that we were not taking on too much. Although we have run the event before in the past few years, we aim to improve the experience each year, but we also need to be aware of our limits or the limits that the students participating have. We have different documents for each part of the event that we need to focus on, with checklists of what we need to get done. This means that we can work on the planning outside of the weekly meetings we have. It has been really great seeing all the different parts come together. After getting the event approved by the service department, and putting the date in the school calendar, it feels like our planning is materialising into an actual event.
