This year, I have joined an Environmental initiative called Raw Beauty. This relatively new initiative focuses on making soaps that contain sustainable and ethically-sourced ingredients to combat the overconsumption of environmentally-harmful beauty products that often contain traces of child labour. In terms of my specific role in Raw Beauty, I am Vice chair. This role allows me to give direct suggestions or ideas to the chair and other members of the service, while also playing a partial role in delegation of tasks and planning the session.
Our first few sessions were spent brainstorming our goals and aims for this year. Since Raw Beauty is a new initiative, we didn’t have any previous ideas or results to help guide us in a particular direction. Because of this, we all collaborated and went around the classroom, writing various ideas on the board that fit into the following four categories of types of action : direct, indirect, advocacy, and research. Every group got a chance to add their ideas to each category, and at the end we went around and highlighted ones that could be considered as our next step.
This activity was immensely helpful in the initial planning stages of our initiative. The collaboration amongst Raw beauty members to collate various ideas full of creativity and resourcefulness has given us the ability to guide our path to obtaining a larger representation amongst the UWC community and decide Raw beauty’s true purpose. A lot of the skills required during this activity were dependent on the group of people. For example, in my group, many people had great ideas, so it was more beneficial to be an active listener and add on to other ideas. For another group however, they were slightly quiet and their number of ideas on the board was initially scarce, so I played the role of an initiator by suggesting possible ideas, to which students responded with their own feedback or modification, prompting them to speak more and give their view. So this collaboration activity required different skills, but it was a great way to start off the year, with many ideas to choose from with everyone contributing. (LO5)
Aside from the collaborative aspect, these first few sessions obviously provided a good set of ‘seed’ ideas, which are ideas that we can eventually execute to meet our aims and goals. Not only did we brainstorm various types of action we can do as an environmental initiative, but we also set our service goals for the year.
This is an integral aspect of what it takes to plan and initiate an experience, especially with a new service like Raw Beauty, where we cannot extrapolate ideas from past years. Goal setting is a stage of planning and initiating that occurs in the beginning, to guide the next process of action-taking and direct involvement. (LO3)
Lastly, I got the chance to identify my strengths and weaknesses (LO1) as an introduction activity before we were allocated roles. 
This is my first time being part of an Environmental initiative in the school, so the initial experience of getting to know this cause and it’s larger implication was extremely eye-opening. Compared to my past experiences in global or local services, I can see that environmental initiatives approach issues in a more direct manner. For example, in Raw Beauty, our job is to produce cosmetic products ourselves for events, and I appreciate this as I am able to see the first-hand results of my change-making skills.
