Consolidating my growth and understanding of this incredibly complex cause will involve me to continually research, and engage with these individuals one-on-one. It is important that we are working towards constantly re-centering ourselves to our mission and the cause we’re trying to help. In a big school like ours, it can be incredibly difficult to stay zoned in on one cause, despite having good intentions, there are so many causes to commit to that it can be difficult to understand where to start. Continuous commitment is crucial to the long-standing relationship that we have with our NGO, who continue to put their trust into us to raise some funds for their projects.

The GC event, UMANG, that we put together was not only an event that tested our leadership, collaboration, and communication, but allowed us to think about something larger than ourselves. Whenever the work became too much, or our motivation wavered for a bit, we kept coming back to the mission. It was difficult to lose motivation when we kept the children of I-India in mind. It is a difficult thing to balance – to what extent can you ensure that the people who are partaking in your competition actually care about the cause? To what extent is it okay that they don’t realise what it is for, if they raise funds anyways? Being at the forefront of such an event which had potential for some change, led me to ask such questions about the moral and ethical implications of making an event out of helping someone else out in dire circumstances. I feel there is no other way to go about this than with a sincere and honest heart. Working from sincerity and keeping the mission in mind will always allow us to stay on track, and bring change in some shape, or form.

To implement our event successfully, planning, but a lot of improvisation and adaptations were necessary. Our event was comprised of many moving parts, and being the one to orchestrate the amalgamation of them required all my organizational skills. It required troubleshooting on the day itself – some people did not claim their work, some finances had not been turned in, we needed to paste the blurbs and descriptions down. However, it was the most satisfying thing I’ve done, seeing it come alive from nothing but an idea in our head. It was heartening to see school-wide participation, especially seeing students of all ages engaging with such complex topics such as women empowerment, cultural celebration and transformations, which all link to the powerful work that the NGO does.

Apart from us running the event, we also needed to get our GC members involved by collecting funds, advocating for the cause, and committing their time to impromptu meetings. I realised that this GC is not just about running a successful event, but it’s about being a good leader. Being a good leader is something people don’t really teach you, and it’s difficult to. I learned you need to involve people and give them the benefit of the doubt.

• Preparation- Planning the experiences

Once we had pitched the idea for our GC to the service leaders and team and gotten it approved, Shreya and I were able to move forward in planning for our GC. This involved looking at specific action we could take for this GC – planning events and planning our sessions. We used our collaboration and mutual investment in the great cause to implement our action. We planned using this document over summer using this google document, and set up connections with our NGO, started building connections with the service office, and got our GC group together.

It was slightly scary leading a GC group when neither of us had done it before. However, because of the research we had done, and our experience being part of other GC groups in the past, we were willing to learn and grow alongside our GC members in this exciting experience. We first started with setting up the systems within the GC. How will leadership look? What are our goals? Shreya and I knew we wanted to establish ourselves as a significant member of the GC community with an event that the whole school would know about. We started preparing for this by ideating. We came up with multiple possibilities and fleshed them out. Once we settled on an Art Competition as our main focus, we started looking for how we could differentiate our event from the rest. What makes it stand out? Once we established our themes, the connection to our NGO and the way we would make money, we started to plan the logistics. Upon reflection, Shreya and I did not nearly fully utilise the resources that the people in our GC could have provided us with: their time and effort. We were too invested and personally involved to trust anyone else with the large responsibilities because we treasured the GC too much. Looking back, this was a mistake as we not only took on too much work, especially during the preparation phase, but we lost the opportunity to establish a bond of trust with our GC members, which would further encourage them to work and help take the GC forward. I did not anticipate the number of service meetings that would take place in the lead up to the event: about marketing, finance, logistics, bookings, students, resources – the list was neverending! However, this experience taught me to take ownership for an event from the start to finish, giving me confidence that I have the ability to nurture a sapling of an idea, and watch it flourish.

1. Investigation- Initial sign-up and investigation of the activity

Shreya and I were keen to set up a GC at the end of grade 10 after both being incredibly moved by the work we’ve seen GC’s in our school do. I joined I-India in middle school and therefore had a connection with the NGO already, however, there was no HS I-India available to join. Shreya and I pitched our idea of setting up a service group, and were approved! We soon started to plan the logistics of the GC, and how it would run. Here is a document of where we wrote our emails to start the GC and the culmination of the process, as well as our GC proposal. It took a lot of research into what the NGO actually does, how we can help, ensuring we fulfill each criterion of the Service and Sustainability’s criteria in order to have a successful chance of being approved. Past this, we also needed to start planning on how we would individually run our GC, as no teacher supervision was being required at all.

1. Preparation- Planning the experiences

Learning how to plan sessions effectively was something I started to get a grip of from my experience in Student Voice in grade 10. However, running a GC is a lot more focused on achieving a set goal – ours was to set up an event and establish our GC as a well-known one. We, therefore, had to plan each meeting, have countless meetings with service and involve the primary school in order to make this event successful. I never realised the amount of time and work that goes behind planning such an event, especially the logistical effort. Upon reflection, Shreya and I did not take full advantage of everyone else who was in our GC, because we felt it would be too difficult to accurately relay all the information to the members of our GC well enough so that they could take over. In hindsight, better communication from the beginning would have made it such that Shreya and I did not have to take on all the work regarding the event.