Intoduction

OSC’s Room To Read is a service dedicated to providing well-resourced reading spaces for local schools around Sri Lanka through the facilitation of necessary materials. I have participated in this service for around 3-4 years, joining when it was started. I have become service leader for the second year, co-leading with Liam Modder- a peer of mine. Over the course of the years, we have renovated a primary school library, started many fundraisers, and worked alongside students of local schools in order to renovate and facilitate their libraries. This year, with the challenge of the coronavirus, we have been fortunate enough to have service online, in which the group meets every Thursday afternoon on zoom to work towards our goals. As for leading the service, every Thursday morning our service supervisor Mrs. Lockwood, Liam, and I, have a zoom meeting to discuss the plan for the service session. This allows us to be sufficiently prepared and run a smooth, efficient, and well-planned service session which will help us to achieve our short and long-term goals. 

For the service sign-ups, I was given the responsibility of creating a slideshow, and recording the presentation of our service video. I completed this video within the required time limit, highlighting our service goals, what action we have taken so far, the schools we have worked with, and some main future goals for the following semesters. Here is a link to the video: LINK

What we have done:

For this service semester, we started to brainstorm for short term events and ideas on a padlet, which allowed us to take the group member’s ideas into consideration. We came up with some good ideas that set up a strong set of short term goals for our service, which would all be feasible online. We planned to do something for the OSC community, by setting up a weekly book recommendation slideshow on the online daily bulletin. This would allow us to spread the joy of reading within our community as well. This was successful, and we dedicate a few minutes during every service session to update it. Adding on to this, we have recently planned to start an online website for our service, in which we help the OSC community to find book stores around Colombo, as well as spread awareness for our service and our upcoming events. We have already kickstarted this, and are currently developing the outline for the website, as well as all the specific components it will entail.

Sending out a Zoom link for the Service session

Future Plans:

As for our long term goals, we plan to raise funds for a local school called the “Bapa Jaya Vidyaloka Maha Vidyalaya”. For now, since we are online, we will be working on the small term goals, such as the website, and online literary event, in order to raise the funds for when we get back to school in person. For our literary event, we plan to invite a guest speaker to discuss a book they have written, raising funds through tickets. We have already started working out the details of the event, including contacting our guest speaker, designing posters, and choosing zoom as our platform. We have also looked into the itinerary, as well as the smaller components such as the method of payment, and how people would get tickets online. There is still a lot to be done, however, we have made a lot of promising progress, especially considering our online situation. I am confident we can complete the preparation of the event by February 2021, which is when we plan to host it. 

CAS Learning Outcomes

My experiences as a service leader have been very challenging, however, I feel as though I am already getting familiar with my responsibilities in our online sessions. This connects to the CAS learning outcomes of identifying my own strengths and develop areas for growth, as well as, recognize the benefits of working collaboratively, and demonstrate engagement with issues of global significance. Throughout the sessions, I find weaknesses within my leading skills by observing the engagement of other members, and the outcomes of our meetings (ex. how much we complete per session). Using this knowledge, I try to change my approaches to leadership, attempting to find the most effective ways to create a collaborative group. For example, when we had split our literary event planning into smaller roles, I noticed it would be better to use breakout rooms on zoom, to allow for more collaboration between members. Adding on to this, I believe Room To Read has helped me recognize the benefits of working collaboratively, helping me to see how much can be achieved when everyone participates by providing diverse ideas and completing assigned tasks. Lastly, Room To Read has allowed me to demonstrate my engagement with issues of global significance, as we work towards making reading more accessible and working to provide books to the students of underprivileged schools. A lack of accessibility to books and a proper reading space keep students from reaching their full potential, as well as enjoying the wonders of reading. Many children around the world do not have proper access to books and libraries, acting as a barrier to their education, as these children will not meet the minimum proficiency reading levels. I want to prevent potential to go to waste by providing access to reading resources for local students, doing so directly through this service group.