We have all come a long way since we signed up for this alternative assignment back in September. The road to the benefit night was a great and exciting journey, which we all learned from and gained valuable life lessons. Through individual and group participation, we all worked together to create a successful event, which not only raised funds for rural Ghanaian students but also raised awareness. Furthermore, through the engagement of this social justice event we made a difference in the lives of the many deserving brilliant, under privileged Ghanaian students.
We started off by communicating with Ms. Gifty and other members of the Ghanaian Canadian Association of British Columbia (GCABC). After acquiring information of the cause and the event, we began taking initiative by going out into the community to seek donations and raise awareness about the upcoming event. We contacted all of the African businesses listed on the GCABC list, however only one business was able to provide support: Taste of Africa was able to donated delicious donuts for the night. We proceeded to delegate tasks to individual group members, which included: the distribution of posters, tickets, promotional water bottles, and the creation of a promotional facebook event. Furthermore, through contact with Ten Thousand Villages, three group members participated in an awareness event at the store which lasted 4 hours. It was a successful in that Ten Thousand Villages donated 15% of the total profit for the day to our event. When we received notice that the premise of the event had been changed, we need to re-strategise to ensure that the event would be entertaining. To make the event more enticing we included prizes that would be worthwhile for people buying raffle tickets. Some of the group members were able to have prizes donated, and we also had to purchase the prizes as well. Also, we contacted many musical acts, and were successful in booking one band. After everything was finalized, we met up at both the Langley and Surrey campuses to promote the event through a second round of ticket pre-sale as well as raising awareness by handing out flyers and more promotional water bottles.
On the day of the event, we met up early at the conference room to set up for all aspects of the night. We assigned roles to each group member to ensure the night would go as smooth as possible. As a last minute addition we were lucky enough to have Bonnie Sutherland as a guest speaker at the event to educate the crowd about the work that Afretech does. We felt that this was the most valuable part of the event because people got to see what is happening in some under developed parts of Africa and how they could contribute. We appreciated that this organisation was strictly non-profit, and had little to no overhead to ensure that every dollar goes directly to improve African communities.
To us, social justice means raising awareness of inequalities, injustices, and being active in the community to help take a stand. The important thing that we took away from the event was the positivity associated with getting involved in social justice events for a greater cause. We learned that it`s possible to make a difference to matter who you are. As we learned in class, silence is deadly, everyone`s voice counts. Motivation and dedication leads to a change and if we all participate, then we can see great progress.
