This was my CAS project and it consist of organizing a poetry event and seva cafe where volunteers from grade 11 prepared food and sold it and the money gained was donated to two charities.I have always been fond of poetry composition and in order to appreciate and in order to encourage more students as well as teachers to write and express would be a pleasure. The issue I am focusing on is the right to express.

I identified my strength of bring able to delegate responsibilities, meeting deadlines and organizing, sequencing the event. However I realised my weakness of confrontation and communication. There was a lot of time when all of my group members were not on the same page because they did not know what tasks work done and what task we left to be. There was also time when group members did not exactly know how to do their work which lead to staying way behind our schedules. I did try to work on my weakness of communication and towards the end of our CAS project my communication became more clear and all the misunderstandings were cleared.

Our event was initially of 2 hours 30 mins but we have gotten over 42 participants, giving each participant at least 5 minutes was extremely difficult to fit into a span of 2.5 hours, we then decided a eliminate certain pieces of work submitted but we realised that it would lead to a great loss of self esteem in the participant. So we then decided to extend the event by 1 hour and so we also had to contact the transport team and ask them whether they were okay with such a delay on such short notice. Turns out they agreed and we extended the event form 2.5h to 3.5h. This in itself was an accomplishment because this suggested that we had done great marketing.

While organizing this event I realised that prioritization was essential if i need to do self management properly. I am not a organized person so it seemed difficult to balance music, studies, table tennis and this event management. However, as soon as we started planning and putting deadlines ahead of ourselves I was able to complete tasks ahead of time and felt greatly satisfied. This project helped me develop the skill of planning and in future it will be comparatively easier for me to plan and organize things.

I surely did understand the importance teamwork and how important does each person play a role in organizing an event at this large scale.

We also did work on issues related to global significance, peace and justice and gender equality. The money we gained from selling the food was 8.3k which we donated to two charities. One was friends with tails which worked for peace and justice for dogs, they organize vaccination drives, spread awareness about certain dog illnesses and work for dog welfare. Another organization we donated money was missing girls which attempts to save trafficked girls in all kinds of danger.

In all I learned the skill of reflection, risk taking and balance. This activity gave a platform to the poets inside our teachers and elementary, high school kids. It also provided monetary incentives to NGO’s with good aims.This project made me feel proud.