What issue did we address?

As discussed in my previous post, Iris and I decided to make a poster/leaflet detailing a few important skills and qualities in order to be an effective RCCI service member. We decided to pursue this particular CAS project in order to address the problem of the lack of experience in physically interacting with the RCCI students. Every year when new members join these qualities and skills are taught to them by service leaders and other previous members, however, as I previously discussed with Anargi, Iris, and myself graduating and many of our current members having little to no interaction with the RCCI students, there are very few people left to teach new members how to behave with, interact and participate in activities with the RCCI students, hence why we decided to make an instructional poster in order to pass down these lessons even if we won’t be students next year.

Poster making process:

This process began with a preliminary brainstorm between Iris and myself. During this time we drafted a list of 12 qualities and skills we thought to be integral to being an RCCI member. This list was then refined down to a final list of 5.

The 5 things we settled on were:

• Communication – Familiarizing oneself with a few Sinhala words to break the language barrier and form a stronger connection with the students.
• Preparedness – Pre-planning activities before every service session in order to have variety and keep sessions interesting.
• Proactiveness – Starting conversations, approaching and being friendly towards the RCCI students as some of them are shy and it takes work to form a bond with them.
•  Listening – being attentive, learn about what their hobbies are, what activities each student enjoys, etc.
• Patience – Most importantly is being patient with the RCCI students, don’t stress if they don’t participate in the activity as planned, or if they take longer to understand try your best to help out or ask a service leader if you need help.

The next step we had to undertake was figuring out what software we would use to design this poster. We considered using photoshop however we eventually settled on using the online poster making software “Canva”

Making the poster (Template selection)

This project whilst not consuming an overwhelming amount of time still required a lot of thought and care on our behalf. We wanted to as effectively as possible summarize our over 2 years of individual experience as members of RCCI and the qualities and skills we have picked up over the years into a simple A3 poster. It was quite a challenge narrowing down our final list of 5 as we have learned quite a lot and grown a lot as people whilst in RCCI. Overall this CAS project in essence marks the conclusion of our RCCI journey and hopefully, it will be helpful in developing future RCCI members in years to come.

Final Poster