Reflection Post by Maryam Ahmed

ODARA is an organisation that offers women the opportunity to build themselves personally, professionally and socially. Odara offers a wide range of workshops that have been created and tailored exclusively for women. The workshop helps women that have vulnerable needs and concerns. We were involved in helping the co-founder of Odara, Aysha Iqbal, spread awareness of the services offered by ODARA. We were assigned to help with fundraising for ODARA - to increase awareness and generate funds , that would be redistributed to aide workshops that help vulnerable women.

Four students (including me) were assigned to come up with innovative ways to promote Fundraising at Odara. We helped organise an event named ‘pizza pamper party’, and helped to sell tickets for entry. We believed this was the most effective way to promote and fundraise for the vulnerable women involved. We created a generic email to be sent to schools, community centres, organisations and GPs, where Aysha would provide a workshop for them to promote the campaign in return. The flyer was created, and the aim was to sell tickets from it.

However, we did not sell enough tickets which led to the event being cancelled. The failure can be attributed to the fact that emails weren’t sent out to community centres and schools, and it wasn’t promoted on social media either. We had organised the event in the space of a month, which attributed to the failure of the event. This experience was an eye-opener, as it taught us that it takes a lot of time, planning and preparation to succeed and a lot of trial and error.

We then created an event toolkit to help Ayesha plan future events, which details what to do and what not to do. We wanted to do this because ODARA staff are constantly on their toes with the services they provide, which results in a lot of things not being communicated to Aysha. The toolkit had clear objectives and provided an action plan. International women’s day is going to be Ayesha’s next event, and the toolkit will aide her in organizing the event and any future events to take place.

I like to thank the efforts of Alison Sharp and all the members who were included in the organisation in the Sparkhill project. This was a unique opportunity which provided me with a valuable experience. I'd also like to thank Jessica, Moneeba and Taibah for being good team players in this roller-coaster of a journey.