Worked collaboratively with others: Service

Room to Read

In July I heard that there was going to be an event in Zurich to fundraise for the Charity Room to Read. I had heard about Room to Read previously at ICS and participated in other events for Room to Read including a "Read-a-thon". On top of the fact the event was run by a charity I am very passionate about it was also based around another love of mine, running. The event centered around a movie called "The Perfect Runner", attached is the trailer. So I got in contact with the organizer Christian and asked him if he needed any help. He replied saying he'd love some help, could I help out with set up, drinks and clean up of the event. 

Here is the press release:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0TEukG-6Mg

I was excited to help out but also nervous about working with people I had never met. The event was to take place in the HUB luckily with my experience helping out with Shore 2 Summit I had heard about the HUB but still managed to get lost  couple of times on my way there. Finally when I arrived I met all the organizers and got started setting up. It was very inspirational to be surrounded with people who all have busy, demanding careers but still make time to give back. I helped pouring drinks but also with the  raffle. It was a long evening, it challenged me to get involved in working with others who all knew each other very well but who did not know me. Overall it was a rewarding evening which taught me a lot about working with new people in foreign situations. 

Undertaken new challenges and increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth: Creativity and Service

Week in an Unfamiliar Environment and Shore2Summit

For my week in an unfamiliar environment I worked for a Zürich based charity called Shore 2 Summit.  In January I had organized to help a human rights lawyer with her campaign to raise awareness of fair trade products and specifically chocolate. Unfortunately she ended up moving to Singapore so I had to come up with another week in an unfamiliar environment plan very quickly. I researched multiple charities and contacted them regarding summer work. Unfortunately many already had volunteers but I persevered and finally got in contact with Shore2Summit. Shore2Summit mission is “to help improve social and economic conditions around the world by providing a simple way for people to identify short-term volunteer opportunities in their local neighborhoods or in other locations around the world when they travel for holiday or business.” I was attracted to Shore2Summit because their mission really inspired me, I really enjoy volunteering and they offer short term volunteering where anyone can make a big impact. Shore2Summit interviewed me by phone and asked me if I could spend a week, Researching non-profits, NGOs and social businesses that they can market our services to, prepare their new CRM (customer relationship management) tool with existing list of potential non-profits (and new from above research) and create draft new email in MailChimp. These were all very new and foreign tasks to me. I hadn’t ever heard of CRM tools before or worked with Mailchimp so I spent a lengthy period getting to grips with the software and learning the ropes. I met with the founder of Shore2Summit, Jennifer DeMattia and she got me started with all the log ins and information. Everyone who works for Shore2Summit work fall time at other jobs so Shore2Summit is essentially run by volunteers. They didn’t have an office building but met at the Hub, a creative, collaborative space in the Viadukt. After I had been given my task and the tools for it I went ahead and got to work. Initially I encountered a couple of problems with the software but after lots of emails and research I managed to iron most of the problems out. The biggest reoccurring problem I had was communicating with Jennifer and her team as they were all very busy and it was difficult to ask for feedback on my work and make sure I was on track. I really enjoyed learning how to use new software.

Here are some of the softwares I used:

Working collaboratively with others: Creativity, Service

As part of my summer holiday plans I wanted to participate in an intensive German course to help my German.  I went out and had interviews at a couple of different German schools to try and find a match for me. In the end I choose the German school I choose because of the opportunity the gave to outside of their class time meet with someone interested in learning your mother tongue and whose mother tongue is the language you are studying. My Language buddy was George, George was German and was looking to improve his German skills. We met every other day for two weeks just for an hour to talk in English and German. At first I was very embarrassed speaking in German as I found he had to correct me a lot and I had to look up words I didn’t know often. However after a while I really felt more comfortable. After half an hour of speaking German it was my turn to help George with his English. I came to our meetings with vocabulary lists and tongue twisters to help his pronunciation. It took a couple of days to really get into the 30-minute discussions but each one became easier. After a couple of sessions we went over some of the class work we were finding difficulty with and exchange our favourite books in our native language for each other to read. In the first week except for my confidence I didn’t see that much difference in my German proficiency. It also became increasingly difficult to meet as I had lots of plans and George was working. We ended up missing one or two meetings but after two weeks I think we had both made a difference in each other’s language abilities. It was really rewarding to help George while improving my German skills. 

Increased awareness of strengths and areas for growth: Creativity and Service

Around May it was announced that towards the end of the year there was to be a couple of days to celebrate the arts. We were given the opportunity to come forward and volunteer to put on arts related workshops for the younger students. I volunteered along with a friend to put on a 3-hour workshop. First we had to research to work out what we were going to offer to the students. I sat down with Ms. Caroline to discuss a couple of ideas I had for my workshop and she advised me to pick something easier as she wanted me to teach the Kindergarten. I was quite apprehensive at teaching a very young age group especially as I didn’t know them or really their abilities. I spoke with my partner and we put together a “My Family and Me” themed workshop. First we were going to introduce ourselves and then we wanted to set about asking the kids about how to draw people and the different characteristics and components that they needed to include. I am not particularly artistically talented by I really did enjoy putting together the workshop as it challenged what I normally plan. I had never done anything like it. After introducing drawing people, we wanted to get the kids to draw their families and then eventually we would get them to tell us what components go in a house and ask them to draw their home. We thought it was probably quite a ambitious plan as it would be difficult to get the kids to go into a large amount of detail. As a precaution we prepared coloring worksheets to keep the kids interested. We wrote down our plan for the two-day arts fest, then sought out the equipment we needed. On the morning of the first arts fest day we were both very nervous. I am a fairly confident public speaker in front of my peers and teachers but teaching and talking to much younger kids was unchartered territory for me. We played some icebreaker games to get to know the kids and I made it my goal to remember as many children’s names as possible. The plan was a success, we had some teething problems at first as some children didn’t know what to draw and some finished really quickly but after a while we both developed a skill of coaxing the children to add more detail and use more color. It was really nice to be involved in teaching the younger student especially since they were very interested and looked up to us. I enjoyed being creative and coming up with ways to keep the kids interested like singing songs and playing games. After three rotational classes over the two days we got better and better at teaching the workshop and I think its safe to say it was a success.

Planned and Initiated Activities: Action, Creativity and Service

The concluding task of our sports leaders course was to plan, prepare and execute a sports day. We were divided into groups negotiated between groups over who would run what sports day. The options were the kindergarten to 2^nd grade sports day, the 3^rd grade to 4^th grade sports day or the 5^th grade to 7^thgrade sports day. Personally I favoured planning the 3^rd to 4^th grade sports day as I thought it would be the easiest to run due to the very close ages of the children. I felt like the older the child the more competitive and therefore the more difficult to run. However many of my group wanted to run the 5^th to 7^th grade sports day and so we went with that age group instead.  We were given a dead line in June, only the week after our exams and I was worried that might lead us to put off planning until last minute. Luckily we remedied this by trying to get all the work done as soon as possible so we could focus on our exam preparation. It was really nice to work in a group, as I don’t really get the opportunity to work in a group at school any more. My group were very friendly and we didn’t have many problems with dividing the workload easily, everyone wanted to pitch in.  At first the task itself was rather daunting how were we going to plan the day, organize the teams, keep the day to the plan? The questions were endless. My job was to organize the teams into house teams equally both age and gender wise which at first I thought wouldn’t be too difficult. It ended up taking much longer than I had anticipated and I had to consult one of the PE teachers, Ms. Ruez to confirm that there weren’t any major problems with the divisions I had made. She advised me to move a couple of people around to make the houses better balanced and then I set to work dividing up the houses into teams. Once I had done that I came back into the group to discuss the games to play. We had a quite lengthy discussion over each of the games but we all took it in terms, voted on which games to play and created a sound plan of the day. I was very proud that we managed not to have any arguments and get the job done. Some problems we encountered while drawing up the playing rota was trying to make sure no team played another twice. In the end we had to settle with a rota were everyone play everyone twice. Once we had done all the planning for the day we handed the portfolio into our sports leaders supervisor, Mrs Osbourne. On the Friday before the sports day after a long time of not thinking about our plan we had a brief group meeting and organized ourselves into pair to set up and run each game. Kunchok and I choose the obstacle course and on the Monday morning of the sports day we set up and ran the game. The game was fairly smooth with only a few problem regarding scoring and penalties. During games if we felt a team had cheated we ended up adding time penalties to their score to try and deter any bad sportsmanship. It was a long and hard day but in the end I was glad all our planning had worked out and the kids had enjoyed their sports day. I think I learnt a lot about dealing with large groups of kids and how best to tell of and reward the kids.