This year’s service semester started later than usual. This was due to the unusual circumstances that this academic year had been forced under. Due to our inability to continue school in person, we continued our learning through our distance learning. This meant that the 1 hour service time every Thursday had to also be moved into an online medium. For some service groups, the change was seamless, however, for us, the experience was quite jarring. Our service is what is called a direct action service group, which means our goals are realized by working directly with the group or thing we are trying to help. In our case, it is the students of the RCCI center. Our service’s fundamental goal is to work hand in hand with the students in order to develop their fine motor skills, as well as develop a friendship with them that allows us to personally connect with them. Due to the circumstances of Covid-19, this approach had to be re-evaluated, and we had to transition ourselves towards a more advocacy-based objective.

In order for our service group to continue, we required members to join, however as there was no service assembly and sign up this year, we had to come up with another method of communicating the goals of our service, as well as market it as a worthwhile activity student would enjoy being a part of. We did this by way of a short promotional video, that we posted to the RCCI youtube channel. Iris, Anargi, and I as the 3 service leaders took on the task of creating this video. We did this using iMovie. The respective task for this video was divided up between the 3 of us, with Iris and me focusing on sourcing images and editing the video, with Anargi taking control of scripting all the blurbs and finding a suitable soundtrack. Despite being a relatively short project (taking just over an hour to complete) I found that it exercised both my creative and service-learning faculties. It was fun to work on iMovie again, and taking the time to re-learn the tools of the software (Learning outcome 2 – Undertaking New Challenges and Developing new skills) and the fact that it was to promote our service group made the effort worthwhile.

Link to the Video: https://youtu.be/kWRSN24RmX0

(Editing the RCCI promotional Video)

Like I mentioned above the fundamental focus of our group had to be shifted somewhat in order for us to remain active this academic year. We decided after much deliberation, that we would shift our group towards an activity/advocacy-based service. We would retain our activity by using our service learning time to research and plan new activities that we could implement into our rotation, once schools open again and the students are allowed to come to the Campus. This way we have a cohesive plan with which we can approach either the next semester or next academic year, these efforts have been largely coordinated by our DP1 members with input from the service leaders and our teacher Ms. Manushi. The DP2 students (Anargi, Iris, and Myself) undertook the task of coordinating the advocacy approach. We decided to produce RCCI branded masks in a joint effort with the Colombo Modle United Nations that we would distribute within the school and the local community. This initiative was proposed by Anargi, a current member of COMUN. Persuienant to this we have scheduled a meeting with the exco members of the COMUN on December 7th to submit a proposal to get the ball rolling. This effort allows us to both raise awareness about the RCCI center as well as distribute masks around our local community which in itself is a form of community service and an initiative that I can proudly call my CAS project.