Reflection

General Reflection

A Service Session Last Year (Photo Credits: Phillip VanHorn)

The completion of my CAS project leaves much room for review and reflection, as well as some opportunities to devise further projects. As discussed previously, the project entails creating a series of videos (available on Youtube, Instagram, and more) that aim to provide children around the world with the chance to gain invaluable swimming skills at the beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels. At the time of my last post, We had completed 1 video and had prepared the scripts for two more. Currently, all three videos are fully filmed and edited, which leads to project to come to a conclusion. Ultimately, I consider this venture to be highly successful in achieving its goal of creating informative content with the potential to teach vital skills to inexperienced swimmers. However, I recognize that our actual outreach leaves something to be desired. Essentially, while the content is good, we are finding it difficult to access a sufficiently large audience to make any tangible difference. Thus, in the future, we might consider using our existing funds to invest in advertisement (which would allow us to have a far greater impact on global communities).

Learning Outcomes

• Demonstrate that challenges have been undertaken, developing new skills in the process
  • As someone who has little experience with digital content creation, this undertaking was certainly a challenge. As a result of this, throughout the process I was able to develop a number of new skills in the process, such as, for example, videography and scriptwriting.
• Demonstrate how to initiate and plan a CAS experience
  • Clearly, being (in conjunction with my fellow service leaders) at the forefront of the planning and execution of this project demonstrates the ability to initiate a CAS experience.
• Show commitment to and perseverance in CAS experiences
  • Although the final product of three videos may seem like a relatively unimpressive feat, the process of tediously planning the topics that would be featured in the videos, writing the scripts, shooting the videos, recording the audio, and editing the final product required significant commitment and perseverance.
• Demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance
  • As I have stated several times in the past, childhood drownings constitute a global issue that is especially prevalent at the local level. Thus, engaging with these issues allows us not only to focus on global problems but also on how they affect our own communities and the solutions that we can devise to address them.

FuTure Projects

Some of the most beneficial aspects of this undertaking are the opportunities for future projects that it introduces. For example, while we are currently working through a digital medium in order to reach a larger audience, understanding that many of our current participants don’t have access to the internet presents an opportunity for us to break into traditional written media such as informative pamphlets and brochures. Such texts would essentially achieve the same aim as our video series but would do so in a way that is far more accessible to much of our target audience.