I have been in many organizations over the years and I did a
lot of volunteer work when I was in high school. I volunteered to raise money
for kids with disabilities and I also volunteered through a school organization
named Dance Marathon to help out the needy in nursing homes by going there and
either playing games with them or cooking food for them. For Dance Marathon
every week we would get sweets and other small products to sell to students
around school in order to raise money the money needed for the needy. At one
point during my senior year we did merge our club with another club named Relay
for Life in order to mutually fundraise more money for finding a cure for
cancer. We did this because during that year one of the most beloved teachers
at our school was diagnosed with cancer so this was the biggest incentive for
everyone to unite and help him fight it. One benefit out of this merge was that
there started to be competition between who would raise more money. We ended up
raising over $20,000 towards finding a cure for cancer. In addition because
these two clubs were so different from each other in the way that they operate
we had to adapt ourselves and acquire the new methods of fundraising that the
new club had set in place. For example one of their main ways of fundraising
was by running, the more you ran the more money you would raise. So everyone
(total of 150 students) started running in marathons and sponsored events to
raise awareness about cancer. The transaction costs for this was the benefit
that everyone in need got for our volunteering whereas for me personally it was
the time and joy that I got out of doing this. Volunteering for me helped me
see things from a different viewpoint and appreciating everything that I have
more. Putting in the time and the effort to help people out helped me make new
friends and helped me make connections through which later I was able to get an
internship with.
Although we did so many things as volunteer work, the amount
of time required into planning everything was absurd. In order for everything
to work perfectly and be as smooth as possible we had to put in hours and hours
of planning. At one point it took us one month of daily after school planning
in order to be able to compete for the cancer awareness marathon. All of this
planning that we had to do really helped me see the other side of everything
and that if you want to do something good then you have to plan intensively for
it. This comes in handy every time that I have group projects and we have to
plan things out. It isn’t always easy to work with new people but with planning
knowledge that I have it does become easier to coordinate with everyone and get
things done smoothly.
It was truly an amazing experience and even though I was
never very natural towards volunteering it truly changed my perception of how
the world truly is. Transaction costs started to matter more once I got a job
and I was exchanging my services for an amount of money. This mattered to me
because this was the incentive that I had in order to come into work and do the
work, if I wouldn’t have received the money then I wouldn't have decided to
show up anymore and the work needed. Because of the volunteering experience
that I got from volunteering money became less important to me because I knew
that my actions were the important thing and that is what matters to real
people in the real world.
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Friday, September 9, 2016
Blog post 9/9
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This post is inadequate. In the syllabus it says there is a 600 word minimum for the post. Can you take another crack at this, one that show more substantial effort?
ReplyDeleteIt would be good to discuss your own motivation in doing the volunteer work. Why did you join the club initially? Did you discuss motivation with fellow club members? Were they similarly motivated or did they do it for different reasons. Then you might consider your motivation over time. What did learning about how the club operated do to influence your motivation?
ReplyDeleteYour discussion about planning for activities focused on the time involved. Could you provide an example or two of what happens during the planning? Could you discuss whether the group who did the planning were appropriate for the activity or not? In a couple of weeks in class we'll discuss committees and how to make them effective. The experience of many people I know is that committee don't accomplish much and take up a huge chunk of time. Is that what happened while you were involved with planning?
The merger of the two clubs as interesting to consider. You might have also talked about how the management of the merged organization different from the management of the individual clubs.
I do know other people who use running (or walking) as a fundraising device. One might want to consider why that works. When my kids were in public school in Champaign, a lot of the fundraising happened by selling merchandise of some sort. Why do you think fundraising happens like that, rather than by merely soliciting cash donations?
Now a simple point on your post title. Please put in a descriptive title for each of your subsequent posts. For this one, to illustrate, you might have given it a tile like - Volunteering in a Student Club. The descriptive title helps in identifying what the post is about.
My motivation for doing the volunteer work was so I could meet new people and try to give back to the community in any way I could. Also part of my motivation was the fact that I was too young to get a job and I needed some sort of resume builder. I decided to join Dance Marathon because one of the teachers that I really liked in high school was the head of that club so I thought that it would be a a fun time as well. After a couple of months I began to realize just how much fun I was having and helping people gave me a feeling of satisfaction. At first I was a little skeptical that I would be able to be good at this and have the patience to actually go through with it, but since I also got a couple of my friends to join the club it gave me the confidence to actually stick with it and not feel intimidated by others who have been volunteering for years before me. All of us wanted to do something to try to give back to the community so Dance Marathon seemed like the way to go about it. Since one of the important parts about this club was the selling part, our teacher gave us pointers on how to sell more sweets fasters so we could have the highest amount donated. This side of it is also what got me excited about the economics side of volunteering and business in general. Learning how to deal with people and how to be patient was one of the best lessons I could ever had. While I was involved we had a lot of meetings where we spent hours on hours debating on what we should do next to fundraise more money. I can't say that it wasn't all beneficial but we did waste a lot of time on the planning part of things. Everyone had different ideas but they didn't have any plan of action so we had to go back and forth on things until we would realize that it wasn't worth then we would have to start from scratch with a new idea. We did have some ideas but because there were more girls than guys in the classroom it often didn't pan out with them so we couldn't do it. For example my group came up with the idea of teaching kids how to play sports then have a mini competition as a fundraiser, but since the majority of the group was girls they voted against it for different reasons. It seemed like there was a never a time that we were all on the same page.
ReplyDeleteI know that a lot of schools choose to do this type of fundraiser because it is much easier for the students to actually raise money this way. More kids are incentivized to help with the fundraiser if they get something in return and for example a $1 chocolate bar is a great way for them to feel like they really contributed to a good cause and get something of value to them in return.