Here I am. My first blog post! After years of thinking and yearning and dreaming, I finally gathered the courage to write my first post. I start off by sharing a charitable cause that I took up recently.
I joined Youth for Seva (http://youthforseva.org/) around 3 months back. The motive was to utilize my Sundays more productively (Only Sundays - no Saturdays, thanks to the corporate job). I became a volunteer for the 'school-kit drive' campaign. Objective was to sponsor school-kits for poor students studying in government schools; each kit costing 250 bucks. We had set ourselves an ambitious target to sponsor around 80k school-kits.
I started off the fundraising activity by putting up posters and pamphlets in my society. I roped in my roomie (Sumeet) to help me out. After a few round of negotiations, we got the notice-board space for 2 full weeks for some token amount (nothing is free in Bangalore, as they say). While the posters generated enough curiosity, people were reluctant to donate because they did not trust the whole thing. We did not collect much from this and I did not have the patience to meet everyone personally and collect funds.
Disappointed by the lukewarm response, we thought of an alternate strategy. Let's organize a Sports day! Different corporate-teams will register and compete against each other, where every participant has to sponsor at least one school kit. We planned Cricket for Guys and Throw-ball competition for girls. Thanks to 'Mico-Bosch', we got their sports ground free and they become our 'Title sponsor'. While 4 teams registered from Bosch, I managed 2 teams from my own company, ITC. We had planned for 32 teams and publicized extensively among our friends and relatives. Finally, 26 teams registered and 20 showed up at the venue. Not bad for a start; I was thrilled to see so many people playing for a charitable cause. The tournament went on for 2 days and it generated quite a lot of publicity. Many participants actually registered for volunteership after the event.
Although, everything went off smoothly, there were a few definite learnings for next year:
1) Long-weekend: We realized this after the tournament got over. Many teams failed to show up at the last moment, because their members had gone home on the long weekend (Sat, Sun and Mon). Too bad, else we could have collected at least a few thousands more.
2) Smaller team sizes: We could have restricted the team-size to 8 instead of 11 (for Cricket). Few teams did not show up, because they managed just 7-8 people from their company. We could have clubbed them with other smaller teams, but people just did not turn up at the venue.
3) Discipline of time: This is something we Indians suck at. The first match got delayed by 1.5 hours, due to some logistics and coordination issue. And it spiraled for the whole day, leading to lot of chaos. Thankfully, we started sharp on time the next day.
Hopefully, next year will be even bigger and better. In case, you feel like donating, please get in touch with me or directly donate on the YFS website. In these times, when people use cricket to showcase might and stay in limelight (IPL), we happened to use Cricket for charity!!
I joined Youth for Seva (http://youthforseva.org/) around 3 months back. The motive was to utilize my Sundays more productively (Only Sundays - no Saturdays, thanks to the corporate job). I became a volunteer for the 'school-kit drive' campaign. Objective was to sponsor school-kits for poor students studying in government schools; each kit costing 250 bucks. We had set ourselves an ambitious target to sponsor around 80k school-kits.
I started off the fundraising activity by putting up posters and pamphlets in my society. I roped in my roomie (Sumeet) to help me out. After a few round of negotiations, we got the notice-board space for 2 full weeks for some token amount (nothing is free in Bangalore, as they say). While the posters generated enough curiosity, people were reluctant to donate because they did not trust the whole thing. We did not collect much from this and I did not have the patience to meet everyone personally and collect funds.
Disappointed by the lukewarm response, we thought of an alternate strategy. Let's organize a Sports day! Different corporate-teams will register and compete against each other, where every participant has to sponsor at least one school kit. We planned Cricket for Guys and Throw-ball competition for girls. Thanks to 'Mico-Bosch', we got their sports ground free and they become our 'Title sponsor'. While 4 teams registered from Bosch, I managed 2 teams from my own company, ITC. We had planned for 32 teams and publicized extensively among our friends and relatives. Finally, 26 teams registered and 20 showed up at the venue. Not bad for a start; I was thrilled to see so many people playing for a charitable cause. The tournament went on for 2 days and it generated quite a lot of publicity. Many participants actually registered for volunteership after the event.
Although, everything went off smoothly, there were a few definite learnings for next year:
1) Long-weekend: We realized this after the tournament got over. Many teams failed to show up at the last moment, because their members had gone home on the long weekend (Sat, Sun and Mon). Too bad, else we could have collected at least a few thousands more.
2) Smaller team sizes: We could have restricted the team-size to 8 instead of 11 (for Cricket). Few teams did not show up, because they managed just 7-8 people from their company. We could have clubbed them with other smaller teams, but people just did not turn up at the venue.
3) Discipline of time: This is something we Indians suck at. The first match got delayed by 1.5 hours, due to some logistics and coordination issue. And it spiraled for the whole day, leading to lot of chaos. Thankfully, we started sharp on time the next day.
Hopefully, next year will be even bigger and better. In case, you feel like donating, please get in touch with me or directly donate on the YFS website. In these times, when people use cricket to showcase might and stay in limelight (IPL), we happened to use Cricket for charity!!
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