On Saturday the 11th of March, our service group hosted its yearly event the Home Run. As part of my CAS project, the goals of this event is to:
– Raise money which can go to creating essential needs for Vidyaloka Vidyalaya
– Bring together our school community, in order to do a physical activity that is engaging in global issues
– Plan and effectively initiate the event, spreading awareness for the cause of our service
As part of the project I was tasked with planning the route for the project whilst also organising stalls for water and directions. Since we partnered up with another service group, we had around twenty people that helped run the event on the day. Before the actual day of the run, there was a lot of planning to make sure that the event went smoothly. This involved contacting drivers and vans to set up stalls, creating list of stops including number of people and location and assigned roles for everyone. During a meeting which we had, I organised a list of people in each of the stalls making sure that it consisted of one male and one female at the least due to issues we had during the previous year. In addition to this, myself and a friend were in charge of creating a route. As part of the planning it was crucial that the route stuck to the 5km journey, whilst also avoiding congested areas with safe areas to run on.
In addition to this, a lot of testing needed to take place before the route was actually approved. This included driving the route to see if any problems existed and making sure that the route itself wasn’t too challenging for runners to complete. It was also decided that our group would contact the schools canteen in order to offer catering services for anyone that wanted to eat in the event. All the proceeds would be given to the canteen, however it allowed for people to be assured food to eat. When planning the event, there were some challenges which we had to overcome. The main challenge was organising a date that most people in the school community could come to support the cause. Due to holidays during the time and SAISA events, we needed to strategise the entire event on a short time crunch. However, through collaboration and dedication the entire event was organised effectively allowing us to overcome this challenge.
During the event itself, I was in charge of riding and leading the group of runners. This entailed making sure that everyone was going the right way, whilst also biking up and down areas to make sure that no one gets lost. In total, we had around 60 runners from the school community consisting of children, parents and teachers. The overall event went very smoothly with everyone getting back to school on time and safely. However, one small problem that we had was the lead runner taking a wrong turn. With this said, I managed to cycle and catch up to the runner, leading them back onto the right track. We charged 1,000LKR per person and earned a total of 71,000LKR from the event in total. All the proceeds went to the Vidyaloka Vidyalaya school, through either direct donations or indirectly creating essentials from them such as chairs and tables. In addition we brought together a large amount of the school community and spread awareness on our service group and the goals which we need to accomplish. Overall, as part of this CAS projects all the goals were accomplished and was very successful.