Service Learning Blog 3

Week 3: (Feb 12th- Feb 17th)
05 April 2012

The last week before the basketball tournament the first thing I did was meet with my friend Josh to get an outside opinion of what we need to work on. Josh has his own non-profit organization and has participated in basketball tournaments before. We discussed the details of the event for about 2 hrs. We set up some rules for the games and made a checklist of things that needed to get done before the tournament. Part of getting the checklist together was contacting Maria and Kelly. Another meeting during the week was with the girls working on the event. Our main focus was to get more teams to sign up.

In the text of Batliwala, Feminist Leadership for Social Transformation, we read ideas of a system that is less like a hierarchy and more like a circle of shared powers. Maria and Emily without a doubt have done an immense amount for the basketball tournament and then the LOL project. I did notice some other girls, as well as I, tried to relieve some of the work from them. Although we did work more as a hierarchy, I did notice from these events that working through more of a power circle would divide the stress and responsibility within everyone. If more of the individuals involved accept more power within an organization then that individual should feel more responsible/accountable. Putting what we have learned to play it shows that there is no clear cut way to do things. There were a lot pf people involved in making the event a success. I believe we had a mix of a hierarchy as well as a circle of shared powers. The event turned out a success and ran very smoothly.

The opportunity I received from this experience was to be part of such an amazing team. Before this I have had little experience with putting an event of this magnitude together. It was an amazing experience because it truly showed me that with hard work things can be done.Seeing this event come together gave me a lot of pride and happiness. It was a great sense of achievement and I gained a good amount of experience through the planning if the YWLP Basketball Tournament.