Amazing Race: Kids Edition

CSR, or Corporate Social Responsibility, has been a really huge part of my life these last 4 years. I currently lead the CSR initiatives of my entire company and also of my department. Obviously, the company-wide efforts are more major and our department works on supporting this. However, once in a while, our department organizes our own CSR activities to provide opportunities for more employees to volunteer and to enhance organization-building.

Last March 19, the CSR team of our department organized an event for kids from the Children's Joy Foundation. We fetched 35 kids from their home in QC and took them to the La Mesa Eco-Park. Our activity was inspired by the reality TV series 'The Amazing Race' - five teams composed of kids and adult volunteers had to go through six different tasks before making their way to the pit stop. As such, we named our event "Amazing Race: Kids Edition". All tasks were all simple enough for the kids to do and were designed to maximize interaction and cooperation among the kids and the volunteers. The final task each team had to complete was putting together a simple jigsaw puzzle.

After all tasks were complete, food was served and prizes and loot bags were given to all the kids. I put together the loot bags and made sure that they had items that would help aid in the learning and development of the kids. As such, the loot bags contained pens, pencils, colored pencils, a notebook, modeling clay, an eraser, a sharpener, a small toy, and some biscuits. That way, they could enjoy these items even weeks after our event which would make the impact of our event more long-lasting than just on that day. Before we left La Mesa Eco-Park, the kids surprised us with a beautiful song number that expressed their gratitude to us and left a few volunteers teary-eyed.

It took a couple of months of planning, organization, and execution to pull off this event but in the end, it was a massive success. The 57 volunteers was the most we've ever had for a CSR event for our department and on our way home, I overheard a lot of kids say this was the most fun activity they ever had. One of the adult supervisors from Children's Joy Foundation sent me a text message thanking us and saying this was the first time the kids attended something like this and it made them truly happy. I'm just happy that I have the opportunity to be involved in efforts to give back to the community.