For my CAS Project, I decided to collaborate with a few of my DP2 peers who were already involved in the same service group as me to plan and host a school fundraiser. The service group I am a part of and leader of is Housing and Habitat. Each year our service aimed to raise funds and build projects to help our school and the local community around us, however since Covid-19 we have been struggling to get back into a consistent routine of projects and been a bit all over the place. We were at a stage where we were trying to figure out projects we could take on however we understood that a need for any projects we would take on is the money to fund the project. There had been some leftover money from the years before Covid but in order to take one a consistent long term project we needed more funds. We had also been in communication with a local school in our community called Vidyaloka school and wanted to host a fundraiser that would raise money for projects that would aim to help improve the learning environment and facilities for the children of this school. So as part of my CAS Project, My peers, Lucca, Liam and Arvin, as well as others in the service group planned the annual Homerun event.

Homerun is a annual fundraiser event that my service used to organize every year before the pandemic, its a 5km run around our local community where participants donate money to us as an entry fee. This year we had decided to host the event on the the 11th of march and we collaborated with another service group CareforPaws which would help provide water for dogs that would come with some of the runners families.

One of my duties as one of the leaders of the project was make sure everything we needed was in place. For this I delegated jobs to each of my service members. I asked  members from grade 10; Ansel, Darius, to work on creating a poster. This poster would need to include

• The date of the event
• Time
• Where this event would be taking place
• What is the cause
• A title including both CareforPaws and Housing and Habitat

After giving them this information they worked on the poster for two service sessions and came up with this.

The next thing I needed to organize was the route. The years before I had planned out a route as seen below and was approximately 5.5km. This year I had asked my other service leaders if they could plan a route, however things that I pointed out that needed to be taken into consideration were;

• The route had to be approximately 5km.
• The route should include both water and directional stops so that people can get water and know where to go.
• It is best if the route stays on main roads or at areas of confusion we should have three of our members located to direct our runners/walkers. (This was an issue with my old route where people got lost and ended up taking a different route back to school. I understood that this was a very important thing to work on as there was an ethical consideration of the responsibility we held as the projects organizing group and if someone where to get lost, particularly a child, we would have to take responsibility.
• The route should aim to minimize crossing of the roads, as this can cause confusion for incoming traffic and possible accidents so we want to prevent as much confusion as we can during the run.

On of my roles was to organize which members were stationed with each other at each directional or water stop. The role of these members is to direct runners/walkers/dogs to stay on the route, and for those at water stops they had to provide water for any of the incoming runners/walkers/dogs. On of the things I had to consider was that these students would be out on the roads and not in the safety of the school so when making partners I made my best effort to place people who were comfortable being on the road and who were older and more mature with the younger members of the service group. This was an important task as the year before there was an incident were two younger girls were placed together and a stranger tried to talk to them on the road and they felt not safe. To be extra precautious I suggested to my service teacher if we could try to get 2 of the school security guards to stay at stops that were close to multiple other stops, and particularly to stay with the younger members of our service group. This was also useful as the security guards were placed in areas of possible traffic confusion, so they were able to stop traffic for our runners to cross the road which turned out be very helpful.

As this was an annual service event I wanted to make sure that we were able to improve upon issues of last year which as addressed above was successfully done. I also however in collaboration with my service supervisor and leaders aimed to see how we could better publicize the event to raise the most funds. One of my ideas was to work the sports department and request that all SAISA athletes who had training that day, instead come and run at the event as a mandatory fitness practice. With the help of Mr.Turner and the help of the SAISA coaches this was possible and so in total we raised 20,000 rupees more than the year before.

Aside from the funds I think this fundraiser and my CAS project was a huge success in terms of making more people aware of the work we do and the help the Vidyaloka School could benefit from our community’s assistance. It was also a nice community event that brought students, faculty, parents and families from both primary and secondary school together for a good cause. I hope this event continues to run after I graduate and want to thank all the members of both CareForPaws and Habitat, especially the other service leaders who put in the work to make this happen.

LO1: Identify your own strengths and develop areas for personal growth: I think I had definitely identified my own strengths, particularly being able to delegate jobs and be able to make best use of different individual skills of my service group such as placing Diyath a Sinhalese speaker in the role of communicating with the truck and van who would pick everyone up.

LO3: Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience: As mentioned above I was more involved in the planning aspect of this collaborative CAS Project, where I spoke to the different heads of departments in school making sure that vans, trucks, water bottles, tables and chairs would be ready for the day of the event.

LO5: Demonstrate the skills and recognize the benefits of working collaboratively: My aim and job as part of this joint CAS project in collaboration with my other service leaders was to help organize the event and make sure everything we needed was in place. My role on the day of the event differed to the other service leaders as I helped with the setting up and planning of the event as well as gave a small speech at the event, whereas my other service leaders were involved in some parts of the planning and heavily active on the day of the event where they were out on the roads working with the runners/walkers. Being able to trust each other to take initiative in our respective roles to join together for collaborative space is something I learned about the collaboration needed between my service leaders and myself during this project.

I explored the other learning outcomes as well however I felt these were the most prevalent and well highlighted during this CAS Project experience.