Navratri is a 9 day Indian festival which brings people together to worship the Goddess Durga. Garba is an Indian folk dance which people perform during Navratri wearing (indian) traditional outfits. I love the Indian culture and as Navratri is my favourite festival, three of my friends and I decided to host a Garba Fest (at our school).
PROPOSAL STAGE:
During a casual conversation with my friends, we came up with the idea of organizing Garba Fest. After our discussion about execution of the event, we realised organizing Garba Fest would help raise cultural awareness among the student community and donating the profit that we make towards a sanitation drive would help benefit underprivileged girls and women who do not have access to sanitary products.
PLANNING STAGE:
Our first step was to organise a meeting with our CAS supervisor to discuss and get our idea approved. To our delight, after knowing the motive of our event, our CAS supervisor approved our idea. My friends and I realised that in order to organise an event at a large scale, it was important for each one of us to know our roles and responsibilities. Our next step was making a list of the things we had to get done i.e- talking to the transport department, food department, forming a decoration team, devising marketing strategy etc. The four of us discussed and divided responsibilities taking each others skill sets into consideration. As I was taking a business class at school, my main responsibility was to negotiate prices and coordinate with the food and transport department. For weeks, my friend and I would go up to the head of food and transport department with revised budget plans and different negotiation styles. After being involved in heated arguments and long discussions with the head of the two departments, we were able to negotiate prices to our advantage.
Moving on, twenty days before the day of the fest, we regulated a form around the student and teacher community in the school to know how many people were interested in attending our fest. Initially, only 45 people were interested in attending our fest. I was disheartened however, I knew this was a challenge and we had to deal with it as we wanted minimum 100-130 participants. We did not give up rather, we altered our marketing strategies and relied on word of mouth advertising to some extent. In addition, we decided to follow ethical code of conduct. We made ethical choices and considerations in a way that did not penalize people who were interested in attending our fest. There were people who were going to attend the fest and had paid the participation fee as well, however, due to Khel Mahakumbh competition, they were unable to attend the fest. We made sure that we returned their money. This is how we followed an ethical code of conduct.
EXECUTION STAGE:
Two days prior to our fest, we had gathered around 80 people however, we knew we wanted more people to come to our fest. We kept our prices nominal and to our surprise, even on the day of our fest, people wanted to buy passes. We sold over 100 passes and achieved our goal. As there were students who bought passes on the day of our fest, it was difficult to arrange food and conveyance for them. My friend and I had to discuss and negotiate with the head of the two departments all over again which was quite a challenge. Overall, regardless of a few glitches that we faced, the event went smoothly. At the end of the fest, students and teachers praised our efforts and the way we executed our fest (this was a proud moment for the four of us as our hard work had paid off).
FINAL TAKEAWAY:
(After the event), when I sat down to introspect, I realised the importance of time management and collaboration an event requires in order for it to be successful. I realised I was good with leadership positions however, I do have to work on being calm when things go wrong.
If given a chance to organize such an event, I would take these 4 things into consideration:
- It is essential to be calm in stressful situations.
- Collaboration and hard work is the key to success.
- Communication is essential.
- One cannot do everything alone; core team is required.
