Monsoon Musings was an event about short stories or poetry recitation. Wherein, I was the logistics coordinator. Together with this event, we had organized a Seva cafe, where customers pay according to what they feel is right. The purpose of Seva cafe was to raise funds for NGO’s (Friends with Tails and Missing Girls project). Through this experience, I developed LO1, LO2, L03, LO4, LO5, LO6 and LO7. 

I was able to identify my strengths and weaknesses through this event. My strengths were, managing tasks with ease, and coming up with solutions for any hazards. Although I need to work on being patient when things are going slow and not panic when something goes haywire. However, now that I am aware of it I can start working towards it so that next time my event will become more successful. I would particularly like to work on remaining patient in difficult situations because I sometimes yelled at people when it wasn’t their fault or took irrational decisions which resulted in ruined relations with my team members. If I had remained calm, I would have come up with better solutions to solve the problem and build trust with my team members that if anything goes wrong they can come to me. 

Moreover, there were a lot of obstacles to reaching a successful event. For instance, completing decorations work due to the limitation of time. Some other challenges were to get some Seva cafe volunteers to stop fooling around, decorating a huge venue with limited resources and getting staff members to participate because they were too shy to do so. To overcome the challenge of decorating in time we used help from Seva cafe volunteers on the day of the event and they were really supportive. Secondly, to get Seva cafe volunteers to work we decided to ask some of them to serve food in the poetry event and some to sit there as the audience. Lastly, we used colorful ropes, and some other events decorations we found lying around to decorate the huge venue. Coming up with ideas to overcome these challenges help me realize that I work great under pressure. This skill will help in future events. 

To initiate this CAS experience, we as a team of coordinators made a timeline to complete tasks so we wouldn’t face difficulties towards the end. I am not usually an organized person so it was tough for me to adjust to this timeline things but gradually I got the hang of it and I feel using this strategy in day to day life will help me to not procrastinate and get things done. The initiating stage was tough because there were some things that required more time than we anticipated like getting teacups and trays for serving or placing the cloth we used for decorations. Although now that I know how timeline strategy works in the future I will be able to anticipate the right timings. 

In addition, showing perseverance was a bit difficult because there were times when for the whole day we used to do the event stuff like making the poster, deciding the Seva cafe menus over and over again it got frustrating, but I guess working in a team really helped. Even though we had assigned work according to our coordinator position, we all helped each other when needed and this made committing to the event easier. 

Furthermore, by donating the funds we raised from Seva cafe (8356\-) we contributed to the issues of global significance. 3000 rupees from the proceeds were donated to the NGO Friends with Tails which helps street dogs with injuries and take care of them until they are in good health. The remaining amount was donated for the Missing Girls project. It is an anti-trafficking campaign using art & technology to create awareness against sex trafficking. Being a part of helping animals and raising awareness against sex trafficking makes me feel proud of myself, that I did somethign to make a change. 

There were some ethical issues involved in this event. For instance, during Seva cafe, some of the ingredients that the volunteers bought were finished and customers were still arriving hence we took a decision to use school ingredients without permission which was unethical so to improve our mistake we returned the int=greditd we used and wrote an apology letter to the school.  

I learned a lot during this CAS experience. Particularly I developed some learner profile characteristics like being a Communicator, an Open-minded person, a Thinker, and I reflected upon on actions. The highlight of this event was when we received overwhelming feedback from the volunteers saying how good leaders we were.

EVIDENCE-:

1. 

2.

3.