Remember how I told you that The PH Group started organizing Colour Me Educated because its original plan wasn’t working out? Well if I haven’t mentioned it yet, that is what happened. Even though it looked great on paper, I had great difficulty communicating to my teammates the vision for the group and it ended up being a whole year of no activity, just meetings and meetings and meetings.
We initially came up with an idea called the Chale Baako P3 project, where we would donate footwear to children who were always walking around barefooted but we realized, after some research and interviewing members of the community, that the children in the community didn’t need footwear, they rather needed to see going to school as a fun thing to do.
The whole idea for Colour Me Educated started after a conversation with a team member, Paul. I was very frustrated and I was ready to give up on the whole dream. I had tried everything, well everything that I could think of, and nothing was working. He, always the optimist, tried to motivate and persuade me to try something else.
He gave me a lot of ideas but the one that stuck with me and seemed like the easiest to do was painting a school. Due to our previous research for the Chale Baako P3 project, we had the necessary information to come up with a viable project. I mean how hard could it be? We just to collaborate with another group (Humane Hearts) and we had already conducted research on the community that we were going to. Ha.ha.ha.
I am going to start a series on the things that I have learnt from organizing the project so that you can learn from my mistakes and have a smoother ride to success with hopefully less/no tears.
The first year was very hard, very very hard and I don’t think that I have used the right number of verys to explain how hard it was. No one knew who we were, what we were about or why we were doing it and we had to raise GHC1,000 in three weeks. Considering the fact that we were doing national service at the time and for me with little/no savings, it seemed quite impossible. GHC1,000 was and is still a lot of money and imagine raising this, not out of selling or offering a good or service, but by selling a vision. It was very daunting.
For 1 week, out of those 3 weeks, it seemed as if the money will not materialize and all I could think of was the fact that we were going to cancel and we were going to fail once again. We (The PH Group and Humane Heart) split the budget into two and tried to raise the funds by using the divide and conquer approach.
We (The PH Group) eventually raised our half by contributing, even though it was very short notice, and we also got donations from other people, who weren’t members of the group. One particular senior of mine at work was so interested in the project that he took time off to have a discussion about it with me.
Everything seemed to be finally going well till I couldn’t find the money. I didn’t lose it but I hid it so well that I couldn’t find it. I searched everywhere, everywhere, but I didn’t find it. I cried, I prayed, I pretended not to be worried but I couldn’t find it. After about 2 days of fruitless searching, I gave up and decided to pay up. I had to pay back out of the little/no savings that I mentioned earlier.
I remember the customer care officer asking me what happened because I had assured her that I was investing my way to financial freedom and was never touching the money, just a few weeks earlier. I just had to smile and say that I had an emergency. I, however, found the money some weeks after the project exactly where I had hidden it.
Even though we had some breakthroughs which made the whole experience better like getting paints donated to us by Miss Malaika 2016, getting a photographer who didn’t charge us that much and getting quite a lot of donations at the end, so many other things went wrong, even on the day of the event, which made it stressful.
The person who was in charge of the food canceled, I forgot to buy water and drinks, we arrived very late at the venue and we couldn’t buy any stationery due to improper planning. Everything was all over the place. I think at this point I should give a shout out to everyone who showed up and didn’t leave till the end of the even to ensure we had quite a successful program.
The whole point of my rambling is that things will go wrong, sometimes in twos or threes, so brace yourself. Secondly, the fact that things are going wrong doesn’t mean that you are going to fail or that you are on the wrong path. If you want to break new ground, be prepared for some serious back breaking work.
From experience, I have seen that if you persevere, solving one challenge at a time, you will make it. In the beginning everything might seem too much or too hard. There might be some tears or some conflicts or even some “why am I even doing this” but if you don’t give up, you will reap the rewards of your hard work and the impact that you are going to make in other people’s lives, is going to make everything that you went through, worth it.