Raising the Bar Event

This Monday, Friendship Circle held their annual event that recognizes the amazing work that their volunteers do.  The theme of this event was "raising the bar". Up until monday, most of my work at Friendship Circle was in preparation of this event.  That day there were many last minute things that had to be taken care of, such as decorating the actual location and doing last minute recordings and practicing speeches, etc.  While the process was very stressful, the event ended up running quite smoothly.

During the actual event, even though I was a teen volunteer throughout the year, I was mainly planning and facilitating.  It was an interesting experience to have to give directions to my peers and teens that I volunteered with throughout the year.

Along with the facilitating aspect, my other main role was to give a speech displaying the magnitude of hours that teen volunteers put into this year.  There were about 700 people there, so getting up on the podium was quite nerve racking.  After crunching the numbers while writing this speech, I found that teen volunteers dedicated over 17,000 hours of volunteer service to the Friendship Circle organization and the kids that they help.  This, to me was such a large number that it is difficult to put into perspective.  With some help from a few of the staff members at friendship circle, we found out that if a person walked for that amount of time, they could walk around the entire world twice. That is a pretty cool statistic, and got quite the applause when I told it to the audience.