The Opportunity: As an organization with 200+ members, the potential for philanthropic impact at the Asian Business Students Association is huge.
The Outcome: Served local austin underprivileged neighborhoods, environments, schools, hospitals, and others through partnering with 12 non-profit organizations and 8 student-run organizations. Also contributed over $1,800 globally to fund building schools in developing countries.
Volunteering Events
ABSA is founded on 3 main pillars: social, philanthropic, and professional. As the volunteering director for the 2017-2018 school year, I spearheaded the organization’s philanthropic efforts within External Branch. In the same way that the main logo for UT Austin goes “What Starts Here Changes the World”, many of our members desired to make a positive impact. Thus, what better place to start our humanitarian effort than with our own local Austin communities.
Being volunteering director means that I had the responsibility of assembling these small-scale, but frequently occurring events. This comprised of constantly collaborating with local non-profit organizations to locate group volunteering opportunities, overseeing event logistics, leading the publicity, and most importantly – being present at these events to guide members.
These volunteering events ranged from curbing detrimental impacts of human invasion within nature by planting 1,250 tree saplings to assembling 19,250 emergency food packages to families who have been affected by natural disasters. Putting numbers aside, all of these experiences were nothing less than rewarding because of the gratitude and love that met us when we were able to assist in any way.
External Events
Aside from volunteering events, I worked closely with my External Branch, a team with 6 other directors. Together, we hosted 3 external events in partnership with other student-run organizations at UT. These events catered to a much larger audience, approximately over 100 attendees for each event. Hence, many preparations had to be done.
Together as a branch we made strategic decisions: which organizations should we partner with? Where should we get sponsorship for these events? What theme should we brand each event?
On the actual event days, my main task is to ensure that the event runs smoothly by assisting with execution: training other volunteers, answering questions to clear up confusion, guiding participants, and others.
Collectively, we earned over $1,800 which were donated to our charity of choice: Pencils of Promise, a non-profit organization that builds schools and provides educational resources for developing countries that may not have the finances to be able to do so on their own.
Key Learnings
Ultimately, being able to serve ABSA as a volunteering was truly a privilege. Not only was I able to serve others alongside my peers, but the insights that I gained from these experiences are priceless:
1) Learn how to motivate your members to maximize impact through gauging their interests and goals. There were definitely certain events that were more favored than others due to member preferences.
2) Leading to my next takeaway: people desire to see an immediate result from their efforts. Whether it be planting tree saplings or serving food to the homeless, people like to look back to see the fruits of their labor. There were instances when this wasn’t the case due to pressure to meet a specific amount of volunteering events per semester. Consequently, my branch and I ended up having to compromise quality for quantity.
3) Last, but definitely not least, the place that you can make a difference is often closer than you think. People, me included, often do not realize how close poverty and the homeless are to them. It is a concept that we perceive as distant and far off when in actuality it is right next door. This realization occurred during one of my volunteering events that involved distributing food to the homeless at Micah 6, a church only a few streets down from my UT apartment complex. An endless line of people came to retrieve their weekly supply of food and each had their own life story.
I will be able to apply these tokens of knowledge to my future roles by bringing a wider perspective to the workplace environment and to remind teams to not overlook the low hanging fruit when attacking a problem.