My most meaningful community service was working on the Events Planning an extracurricular activity that we have in our school. This is an activity that requires time and effort because of the number of events that a school our has. In this activity, we get to plan events like the UWC Day, the Tedx Event (even though we do not participate in the main organization team), a Hunger Banquet and Crop Walk to promote awareness about hunger in the world, the Annual Conference, and planning activities for the Martin Luther King Day. Concerning the Hunger Banquet and Crop Walk, I found myself many times defending my continent in the group to advocate for the fact that there's not only hunger in African Countries and that social media influence the way people perceive them. We also help to connect the schools and the local community in Las Vegas and it was gratifying to see everyone walking for the same cause during the Crop Walk and knowing that the money donated would go to local Soup Kitchens. I chose this extracurricular activity because this is an activity that I feel that everyone's help and time is equally essential in order for the events to work.

 

• Annual Conference: This event was the one that required a lot of preparation since the beginning of the year. This event had the central theme of Migration and Belonging, which can be related to almost everyone in the school. Our Exed planned the workshops, did the bibliographies, we planned everything that happened in that conference with Naomi’s sponsorship. It was hard at the beginning of the year to get started with the project, but once our team worked together and divided tasks, the process went smoothly. For this conference, I helped to contact the speakers and to edit their biographies and I also helped to design the program for the rededication of the Nelson Mandela garden, in which many former faculty members got their names written in bricks in the garden. I was also happy to co-introduce Ndaba Mandela to the opening ceremony of the conference and go the chance to ask him questions related to his work and what he thinks of the genocide in Rwanda. I was happy with the Black/African representation in this conference and it also made me happy to set them as examples for my future life.

 

• The Hunger Banquet was a learning experience for each one of the banquet. The hunger banquet is a social experiment that was organized by us to promote awareness about hunger around the world and motivate people to show up and make donations to the Crop Walk happening in the same week. My work with for this event was to organize a forum on the same day to debrief about what the community thought about the experiment and advertise the CROP Walk. During the school's forum, people showed discontent and impatience towards our Exed. However, we as an Exed debriefed on why it had the reactions it did and some of the solutions can be found in the document attached in the Events planning Exed. When we planned this event, we didn’t take into consideration that it was about to happen the day most math IA’s were due. Many people were also caught up in surprise because we didn’t warn people that the Banquet was going to happen. 

 

• Crop Walk: As a result of the hunger banquet, many students showed up to the march and the money was donated to local soup kitchens, including the one that I work on every other Tuesday. It is true that people were upset about the banquet, but I also like to believe that some of them reflected on why they had such reaction, and perhaps the privilege that we have to be able to eat different meals a day in the cafeteria.  

 

• Tedx: The TEDx event had less of the involvement of the Events planning Exed. In this event, our involvement was limited to helping the Tedx team with distributing the flyers and programs, distributing some of the UWC pamphlets and putting signs all over campus to give direction so that people from the Las Vegas community knew where to go to.

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