My time spent at Jakarta Street Kids was incredible, I met new people and perspectives and I was able to learn so much about how to approach issues in communities and effectively solve them even when facing a pandemic. It was great to finally be able to test my mettle as a communications officer with the pandemic requiring me to always be alert for e mails new projects and documents that need to be seen by other members of the service. Not to mention my part leading a group on the GC website was thoroughly difficult in that I had to not only motivate people who felt despondent towards working in what seemed like futility.

Thankfully, our efforts in bringing in information, volunteers and a new positive attitude helped everyone persevere through the school fundraising competition. In this competition we were tasked with creating an advocacy video, and whichever GC had the best video (as voted by other students) would be granted a 5000$ reward for fundraising. Having learnt about advocacy through my gruelling experience in trying to bring light to the service, I understood that sometimes sentiment is able to communicate a message with much more impact than with statistics. The concept came to me when trying to convince the other students to help me out – by diverting their attention from the depressing statistical viewpoint that they had, I was able to impart a sense of hope in them. So instead of bombarding the video with statistics, I pushed for the inclusion of personal anecdotes from volunteers and the Jakartan children to imbue a sentimental connection that high school students could relate to. Of course I still encouraged the use of statistics and facts to ground the video in reality; but I feel confident in saying we produced an excellent video, because we actually won the competition and helped keep JSK on its feet.