Reflecting

For the past couple of weeks I have been working on the organizational side of my project. On November 2 we started handing out trees! These trees have the names of different kids in our community and allow others to help contribute to my project. They do this by grabbing a card and either buying a present for the child or donating 30 dollars. I am really excited that this portion of my project has started because that means we will begin to organize the gifts. For the past couple of weeks we have had activites such as Karma Yoga classes in order to get the community involved and aware of my project. It has been such a fun and inviting way to fundraise and raise awareness. These past two weeks have been stressful but my project is getting to the fun part. We will be receiving hundreds of gifts that we will have to sort through and organize. Although time consuming it will be so rewarding when we get to hand them out to the kids. I hope by the end of this week all the trees will be at the businesses and we will begin with the last step of the project. One thing I need to work on for the upcoming weeks is ensuring that I am maintaining sufficient contact with all people related to the project. This includes Karalee, Lindsey, all the store owners, Laetitia and Lauren. I need to make sure that this happens so that we are all on the same page and able to move forward in an effective manner.

The purpose of this entire project is to make these kids happy. They don’t get the same opportunities and rewards as we do and I want to help provide then with these gifts and show them that they are able to achieve things outside of our community. I want to motivate them and get them excited. Hopefully after my project has finished I will be able to help a couple of specific families to develop their lives in a positive way. I am so excited I can barely contain it. There are several reasons for that but one stands out. I have worked in helping my mom with this project for the past seven years, this year she allowed me to take it over. With the help of Lindsey, a volunteer at CEPIA we were able to make small tweaks in the process in order to try to get the kids gifts they wanted. This may sound easy but when you are talking about 700 kids it’s not. Due to this small thing that we changed we will hopefully be able to provide these kids with their desired gifts. This gives me so much joy because the entire point of this project is to make these kids happy and we weren’t able to achieve that in the past.