Wednesday, November 09, 2005

Koshish: A small step towards life long journey ( Blood donation camp at IIFT)

Koshish was born in October 2005, when a group of IIFTians , batch 2004-06 formed this CSR club for the first time in IIFT. I still remember the evening when I discussed this noble idea with some of my batch mates, Manish and Deepak.. The mood was upbeat and lot of people joined in our journey. Though we gathered good numbers but only few guys were able to commit to the cause. But, these few guys were the ones who really made a difference to the whole club.
The activities that we planned for this club were helping NGO's in finding business solutions for them by getting live projects from them; working with NGO's at ground level and held periodically discussions on social issues. We made good plans but those only remained on the PowerPoint slides. This was really hurting us guys. But, one thing was for sure that we will make this club a functional one.
The first work that we took was helping an NGO called Goonj in Tsunami Relief operations. Around 7-8 guys went to the Goonj office for few days and did logistics and back office operations for them.
Few of us also worked with Helpage India in making a business plan for them for starting Helpage shops. Then, the pressure of summer training started building up, and everyone got busy in their career planning. The activities got stagnated.
Today is 9th Nov. 2006, and I am happy to write that we again revived the club with a major initiative by organising blood donation camp at IIFT on 8th Nov. in association with Rotary International.
We were given a target of around 100 blood donors and we happily surpassed the target by 17 donors more. The mood is joyous among the volunteers who worked hard for three nights to make it a successful event. Honestly, speaking we were very apprehensive about the target as the camp was planned on a short notice of 4 days. Even, on the D-day, we had only 15 people in the morning, all volunteers who wanted to donate blood. But, the colours of our hard work started showing after 30 minutes of start and queue began to develop. The volunteers were complementing each other and playing jokes on each other which made the task easy to handle. Soon, the figures crossed 50, then 80, then 100 and the doctors started to feel the pressure of examining so many donors. A total of 141 donors were examined, of which 24 were rejected because of some reasons. Many girls were rejected due to low haemoglobin count, and they were requesting me to talk with the doctor about them, as they were very keen to donate blood. We highly appreciate those people.
The event also got a pre coverage in Times of India, Delhi Edition (Education Times, 3rd page) on 7th nov. 2006. This along with heavy promotion techniques also brought donors from whole of Qutab land from offices such as E& Y , DFID and other B -schools in vicinity.
There is so much to write about this event, the insights of organising this event. But let the story unfold gradually, I have a class now but I wont go before thanking everyone especially the first year , who are very enthusiastic guys and gals. Also, many thanks to Deepak and Manish and Santosh who made immense contribution in the whole event. I also thank specially to Shivani, Gitika, Ompriya , Piysh and all other volunteers for their great support and team work. And not the least, my roomie Rohit, who kept encouraging me and advised me not to worry about criticism from some of the guys.
Well, coming more, plz wait for some time. See you all after a break

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Nice to know that you are a time traveller. Note the dates on your blog.