As my CAS Project, I decided to lead an event which was a first for our FS community. This event was proposed by the language team. It was a literary event where the parents, students as well as teachers of FS could come and recite their original written work, may it be poetry, short stories or anything else. This year we could only limit it to Senior School (Grades 7 -12) in terms of participation as it was a debut event for the school and all of the things we tried were new, and we really didn’t know how much is going to be the turnover for our event in terms of crowd management. We also didn’t keep it for the PYP because all the teachers had a workshop they were supposed to attend in the school. We also had Seva Cafe, which is an adaptation of Karma Kitchen, for all the attendees of the event. And at the same venue, we had an art exhibition in which students of Senior School volunteered to put up their artworks for display. We didn’t charge people for anything, but we had donation boxes kept everywhere as this event was for charity.

By leading this event I identified my own strengths and developed areas for growth as this was the first event I had led completely. I was the Event Coordinator for this event. There were 3 parts to this whole event of ‘Monsoon Musings’ – 1) Poetry/Short stories event, 2) Seva Cafe and 3) Art exhibition. I was the in-charge of the Seva Cafe and the Art exhibition, and the other coordinator, Project Coordinator was in-charge of the poetry event. I had been a part of the Organising Committee for a lot of events but was never in a leading position as such. This time, I was the leader of everything regarding the Seva Cafe or the Art exhibition. And evidently, this was a huge jump for me as far as responsibilities and duties were concerned. Leadership was new to me with this event. I identified that my strength in the role of a leader was to understand everyone’s situation properly and to know the practicality of things to be done. There were some issues in our team when we talk about communication, as the OC majorly comprised of Grade 11, and the leaders were of Grade 12, and these grades don’t have a strong connection with each other. So the communication gap created some unrest within the organizing team and had to be resolved through the coordinators. Also while discussing how the event should be done and what would be better to do to reduce our workload but improve the quality and the smoothness of the event, I was able to provide with good ideas which were then implemented in the event. I developed the areas of growth was in terms of punctuality. I was supposed to report to our teacher coordinators with the deadlines and updates of the work of the event. And to do that, I pushed my team to work harder where necessary to meet the deadlines.

There were certain challenges that I undertook as a coordinator of the event. Initially, we had a lot of meetings to just set the flow of the event and decide upon the venues and the timings of the various parts of the whole event. This was because this is the first time FS had seen such an event and we were the main planners of it. Other events are recurring at our school so people joining the new edition have a base to start with. We were the ones to make that base for the coming years for our juniors to make this event an annual one with bigger success in the future. So the challenges were to make the event look good even in its debut and also attain the purpose of doing it. We had to think about everything related to the resources required, the preparation and the decoration of the venues, how much time do we need for the decoration to start and finish the day before the event, etc. And the challenge as a coordinator was to coordinate with every department and make sure that everyone was working according to the tasks given. Sometimes, some or the other of the departments were not working as they were supposed to and to get that work done anyhow was the most challenging for us as coordinators.

We planned this CAS experience from scratch as I said that this was a debut event and everything was planned by the student coordinators with just the approval of teachers regarding school permissions and allowance of things we wanted to do. The flow of the event was decided by us. We discussed upon how will we take the entries and make sure about the academic honesty about their work. The forms of participation to record entries were also made according to the data we needed. Everything was planned in a series of meetings, after which the actual groundwork began.

There were a lot of benefits of working collaboratively as it is evident that the event was very big, as it comprised of 3 small events that made up the whole event. And for every event, an equal amount of work and preparation was required to make that particular event successful. So for each event, we had specific departments who were supposed to work on that event only. There were some other departments like Marketing which was common for the whole event too. For the art exhibition, the collection of the submitted artworks, and how to display them in their given venue was supposed to be done by the art team. Their requirement and availability of the resources were also to be done. And then the poetry team comprised of Academic honesty department whose jobs were to look upon the originality of the literary work submitted by interested participants. And the Seva Cafe team was appointed a menu and a large number of people to work in the kitchen at the time of the event. So, as there was a lot of work which was very specific to certain departments, it was a required thing that all of us had to work collaboratively. Its benefits were definitely the time it took to complete the work, which was way less if everyone would have worked separately. Like if we take the example of Seva Cafe, the kitchen members were appointed specific ingredients they were supposed to bring to make the whole dish in school. If that wouldn’t have been done, it is highly probable that some people might have brought the same stuff and the dish wouldn’t have been completed then.

This event was a charity event. Thus we recognized the ethics of choices and actions as we needed to select a charity to donate the amount we would collect through our event. We went through some organizations which accept donations and looked at their motives and what was the basic aim they were trying to achieve. Our team had decided roughly that we would do something related (beneficial) for children. We looked up organizations like Save The Child, Aga Khan Foundation, etc. Then we got to learn that our school’s Grade 4 is doing a charity event. So we decided that it is better to promote our own school’s charity efforts.

This event provided a platform for the budding writers of our FS community to present and get their work acknowledged and appreciated. The highlight of this event was when I saw the registrations and quite a lot of them were from Grade 7, and it made me happy to see so many young writers with their original works. This shows that our school has a bright future for student writers. This event was successful as we collected around Rs. 9500. I hope that the next batches will continue this event with a bigger audience and a bigger list of participants.

Here is the link for my planning sheet:- https://drive.google.com/open?id=1z1pVamQwevG3nvRc3nOW-YKt8747XU4Id6dvrXcWXUc