IVY GIRLS Lead

IVY GIRLS LEAD Pt. 1

(takeaways + the foreseeable future )

I realize that I haven’t been as active on here as much as I would have liked to have been, but I assure you that I have been taking every opportunity away from my blog to take on a new and exciting challenge.

In fact, one of the most notable activities that I have taken on since my last update was a project that Ms. Fleming (our school counselor)  introduced to us late last year around winter break. Since then, myself along with 24 other girls from across the island and from school have taken part in a 4 month long initiative to empower young women in leadership positions, with the mentorship of over 7 notable international Ivy League graduates. This was an incredible honor since only 25 of us got chosen out of 200 people that enrolled island wide! As a result of this opportunity, I was able to make friends with a diverse group of incredible girls along the way and not only that but I got a once in a lifetime opportunity to come into contact with an immensely inspirational group of  female leaders along the way.

The first two weeks of the experience consisted of introductions, team building activities and many guest speakers, who told us the intricacies of what it took to succeed as a female leader in the world.

The topics ranged from self affirmation to breaking gender norms and purpose finding, all of which I found extremely beneficial to add to my arsenal of knowledge.

My personal favorite was the very first session led by author Christy Rutherford, who gave everyone an amusing, but memorable talk on self affirmation and deciding the difference between coming across as arrogant and cocky and being confident and put together.

Starting out with the Girls Lead,  I must admit that I wasn’t entirely keen on being put in a zoom meeting with a majority of strangers at first. I may seem somewhat extroverted at times but in reality I’m pretty shy and awkward in social situations, and as for me, having to step up to the role of a leader in a room full of very talented and outspoken girls seemed beyond daunting to me.

As I wrote down in my main goal for the Lead at the very beginning, I really wanted to improve my confidence, because it just so happens to be that I have a lot of thoughts but they unfortunately tend to become difficult to articulate the correct way when I’m under pressure or have to speak in a public context.

Thankfully for me, I got to grow in leaps and bounds in that aspect. There was a visible change in the way I carried myself along the the course program and it became evident to myself and the people I interacted with on a daily basis, that I truly had learned to step outside of my comfort zone and rise to the occasion.

A lot of people would not be granted such once in a lifetime opportunities to get such hugely informative lectures from such qualified, experienced and capable people that had succeeded so much in their fields of work, which is when I knew that it was not something that I could take for granted.

After that realization, I actively participated in each call, making sure to ask questions and share my thoughts every session and even took the initiative of leading my group’s service task. I even diligently took notes to make the most of what was being said, which in hindsight was a very wise decision, I look back it every so often for a boost in morale.  It was clear that I had changed so much by the end of the program that even the CEO of the Ivy League, Swati Sahni, laughed on the last day when I told her about my initial goal and she responded by saying ‘We could’ve never guessed! You did really great.’ 😂

Overall, I am extremely proud of how much I managed to grasp from those two weeks of leadership development and am already applying it to real life, in areas like football where I require a certain sense of leadership whether it is to coach or to share my ideas on how we could improve our gameplay.

This program has been so effective and such a learning curve for as that the OSC batch in Ivy Girls Lead decided that we wanted to be able provide the same kind of opportunity our OSC student body as well!

Only this time, it will be us mentoring the girls! We felt this might be hugely useful as having gone through middle school myself, I know how difficult it can get for us to stay motivated or to be confident or feel welcome enough to share our own opinions, especially at this age where everyone is trying to figure their own identities out, I know I for one would have benefitted hugely with some time of guidance and support along the way.

And so it has come time that we introduced the new *drumroll please…*  OSC Girls Rise Program!!  We are very much looking foreword to launching the project in the near future where we, the former students will become the next group of mentors! (more on this in the upcoming posts)

Here are a few of my own session notes! Feel free to use them for personal reference, I promise they’re very conveniently useful 🙂 

http://Session Notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1YG6ztn-Ebn9Bbyf2VrFKywubxkcgXJ99geCVYwl446E/edit?usp=sharing

 

Hope For Kids – Looking Forward During the Pandemic

Hope for Kids – A Virtual Christmas

The 12th of November rang in the first ever group meeting for the Hope for Kids service group for the 2020-21 academic year. While it was carried out under rather unusual circumstances considering that we were met on Zoom, it covered a very detailed itinerary of what we had to plan and carry out for the remainder of the semester.

This year, marks my second consecutive year as a member of this service and I am beyond excited to see what this year has in store for us. Moreover, I plan on it being a long time project of mine since I got rather invested in it since my debut in Hope for Kids last year!! (LO4)

In terms of what we do as the Hope For Kids service group, we spend most Thursday afternoons, (under non-pandemic circumstances) at the CCC Cancer House in Maharagama, engaging with the younger cancer patients and their parents at the home with hopes of brightening up their week in whichever way we see fit. Our time there is well spent and we find ourselves engaging in activities ranging from creating sock puppets, to buying the kids new toys and resources and taking part in things as simple as playing catch – all of which is rewarded by eager smiling faces which makes everything all the more, worth it. (LO6)

Unfortunately for us, this session, we learned that we would not be allowed to visit the home in person for the remainder of the year, which is understandable seeing as the children have weaker immune systems than we do and it would be too much of a risk to come into direct contact with them at this stage after being exposed to a pandemic environment. (LO7)

Luckily, we were able to come to a happy conclusion, that this wouldn’t be stopping us from continuing to do what we intend to do for our friends at the CCC home.

To help us out in terms of organization, we first created a planner with a list of actions we CAN take despite the restrictions of the pandemic. The ideas ranged from creating a social media page to raise awareness, to conducting food drives and fundraisers and our foremost endeavor which was to take on a small craft session in groups in order to help bring about the festive spirit at the home.

Traditionally, we would have met with the kids in person, taken our art supplies and helped them create Christmas related ornaments and crafts of their choice, but this year, we have decided to bring them our rendition of a virtual Christmas celebration! We came up with the idea of creating ornaments and other Christmas decorations, recording tutorial videos in the process which we could then upload to a Google Drive for them to access and follow from the safety of the home. I also supplied the idea that we could try and use Zoom calls to engage with them on a more personal level in case they needed more assistance which the the videos themselves can’t provide. (LO3)

This led to another excited discussion about what we could to to make this pandemic Christmas as spirited as we could despite our circumstances and we decided we could go virtual caroling as well! As a final course of action, we planned on buying them gifts; same as every year, and having it sanitized and delivered to the home along with some other rations and our art supplies which they can use on our Thursday sessions.

After splitting up into groups, I decided to work with Anya and Ashvini on paper decorations. Initially, we planned on physically making them and cutting them out i.e. making literal decorations but we realized that it would be difficult for the kids to re-create without any assistance. Plus, the creation process was rather complex and it required a lot of materials we didn’t have, so taking that and their age groups into consideration, I offered an idea which was to source different designs from the internet i.e. printable cutouts of stars, circle ornaments, candy canes, angels etc. for them to print directly and color. This way, there would be reduced chances of contamination, we had a larger variety of designs and the parents could get involved and help cutout the designs and the children could draw and color on them. (LO5)

This activity is rather simple but also very considerate understanding that many of the children are often very fatigued by chemotherapy and are unable to complete high energy requiring activities. (LO7)

Ideally, by next week we should have roughly 6 designs sourced (each) and our next steps will be to make the video tutorial which Anya will record and Ashvini and I will add voiceovers to in order to reduce the language barrier since most kids can only speak Sinhala.

GROUP MEETING! :))

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