Over the past few months, I as a leader of housing and habitat have been involved in planning a community charity event in order to raise funds for our group to enable us to aid a a school within our local community.

In the working stages of planning this event, we as a group spent a lot of time working out the logistics, in reference to which date we should host? do we want to collaborate with Care For Paws? How much should Tickets be?, and many more questions. I think as one of the leaders, I found this the most challenging as I had to assume what dates work the best for everyone as well as trying to calculate how much money we needed.

Our other task ahead was creating the poster for Homerun. Here I worked with Arvin in order to create the poster as well as provide him with information we needed on the poster. Information such as; the date, cost per entry, time, attire, logos of both Care For Paws and Housing and Habitat, etc. The poster turned out great and we spent about 30mins setting up about 75posters around school. We also had a interesting idea which was to include a QR code of the map on the poster, enabling runners to see the map on their phone and/or if someone got lost they would be able to find the route.

The process I found the hardest was creating the route, this task required us to make a route that first was 5km overall, was safe, easy to navigate as well as had limited areas for crossing the road. The route process was done by Lucca, Liam and myself, where the final route was tested by Lucca, Mr.Leblanc and myself. We notice the only issues with the route was between DS3 and DS4 which were direction stops, that the road was a misleading mud road that did not stand out, this mean that we needed to ensure that runners took this turn so we placed people at these stops.

lThe final product took place last weekend on the 23rd of may 2022. This day started off with us waking up at 5 and one of the biggest challenges was to get everyone in school by 6:45. However once I got to school I was glad to know that every took the responsibility to come in more or less in time which was enabled us to start setting up stations.

Here our communicative and patience skills were tested as we had multiple transport vehicles that needed instructions and coordination from Lucca and myself, as I was at school speaking in Sinhala to the drivers who were driving Lucca and the others in the truck. This was a challenge especially because we needed to make sure the runners as well as our team out on the roads were safe and that we knew where they were. We were able to make sure everyone was ok, however we did have a hiccup as between stops DS2-DS4 people had ended up taking a wrong turn during this straight stretch which lead to almost and extra Km for those runners as well as the placement of individuals was not done as specific to the map which led to confusion on how to get to DS5 however through these challenges we were happy that everyone made it back safe and although it meant a little more running for some.

This event was a great success, as we were able to collect the funds necessary for us to start our service projects with a school in our local community, this process will officially begin in the next semester in 2022 august. It was also great to have all the families and friends out to socialize and take part in a community service event.

This in terms of activity we definitely had activity with myself running around to help set up stations as well as the activity done by our runners and members of H&H and C4P on bikes and at stops.

This experience taught me about the effort needed to plan and organize large scale events, the creative and marketing related aspects needed to bring people out as well as the responsibility we have as an organization to take care of our runners as well as our own peers.