Sapna Marwaha

Working from home is proving a little more difficult than I thought…

It’s been a frustrating day of waiting for responses.  After sending out loads of emails and leaving messages, I found myself at a bit of a loose end and struggling to get to grips with what I should be doing. 

 The lists of events and advertising contacts that I had made were all being dealt with and I received a few instant replies but mostly none so far.  Since most of the university careers events had passed, I looked into other ways to get in touch with people and thought about new groups we could target. 

So far, Xchange has always focussed their attention on students so I emailed a couple of the main Scottish Universities about holding talks or stalls in the Union but, still waiting on responses.  Even though the volunteering projects are open to anyone, students have been an obvious choice to target because they have long holidays to fill and are often looking for interesting things to do with their summers.

A picture from the Vietnamese project

However, on my volunteer projects, I was one of the youngest in both projects.  I had gone expecting to be surrounded by 18 year old gap year students, but ages ranged from 20 – 65.  So, I thought about ways to target a wider audience.  Another group with a long holidays to occupy are teachers and pupils.  There are over 50 projects for teens (16 and 17 year olds) on the Xchange database, which you can find here.  Teachers would be able to apply for all of the standard projects, whether they are just looking for an interesting way to spend their summer holidays and wanted to spend a couple of weeks working with the Youth House School for Disadvataged Kids in Vietnam or if they are some of the unlucky probationers coming to the end of their stint and looking for more experience and wanted to spend the year teaching at an Orphanage in Kyrgyzstan.  I started thinking about new flyers and posters, how we were going to get them around schools, how we could pitch it etc.

While occupying myself with a bit of file management and trying to put together an information sharing system to make things easier, I got an email from Martin that threw me a little.  It made me think that I’d been travelling down the wrong path for most of the day – ah!  He told me that we should be focussing more on what’s happening next year and that I shouldn’t get too worried about things for this year.

Tickling the baby elephant's trunk at bathtime!

So I picked up the phone and after a long chat with me asking lots of questions, and lying about several being the ‘last one’, it felt like we really got somewhere.  The key is the budget is gone!  Okay, not quite as dramatic as I make out… While I was off painting classrooms in Kannur and washing elephants in Kochi, the team was attending careers fairs and distributing leaflets and generally, getting out there and spreading the message.  So, we are not turning anyone away and we still want to attract as many volunteers as possible, but I need to be a bit more resourceful about any more advertising and make sure we are using all of the free outlets available.  I also need to make sure that we have all of the templates and structures in place to make sure that we have an amazing and well organised strategy for next year and no-one is stuck reinventing the wheel, starting from scratch all over again.   So everything I’ve done is still relevant and useful, I just need to think of new ways to use the information.  It felt like a bit of a breakthrough and I feel a lot better about what I am meant to be doing with myself.  Time to get on with it!