The Village Project
Musical Fundraiser: In the light of covid-19 our village trip was cancelled however, our quest to save the village of Kumbhargarh remained undeterred. The roof of a school in Kumbhargarh village broke during the Nisarga Cyclone which disrupted the learning process for the students. Our CAS group had to raise over 5L rupees to help rebuild the roof again and so, DAIS Village Project students decided to host a musical fundraiser – A live online concert !
The music concert performers hailed from various Mumbai schools, including our own. These performers would sing and play instruments in order to appeal to our audience. Our viewers were able to view this performance after donating 500 rupees towards our efforts to rebuild the roof of the school in Kumbhargarh. In order to garner a large enough audience to raise the required sum of money, we had to market our concert through word of mouth, Instagram, and Whatsapp groups. We were able to be extremely creative with our posters, messages, and videos. The decision of having a zoom concert was the perfect way to not only showcase the talent of so many young artists but also use this to our advantage to collect funds to rebuild the roof. We narrowed down a list of about 20-25 participants. Putting them into groups, we encouraged them to perform the song of their choice together. Before the recordings started, we got in touch with 'penn masala' band, to get a clearer idea carrying out recordings and hosting the concert.
Overall, by finding a popular and innovative way to raise money and tackling each of our hurdles step by step as a team, we were able to successfully host a musical concert which received a lot of positive feedback and was able to raise money for the roof of the school in Kumbhalgarh.
Esports: Starting out with a goal of raising Rs. 1.5L would be no easy feat. After our first meeting, we decided to proceed with Among Us and FIFA 20 tournaments – the most popular games at the time according to us. Then began a long process of planning these events in a virtual space over approximately 5-6 CAS sessions before we could actually conduct them. We decided upon an amount people would need to contribute to register, setting up a Wix website to ease the registration process, and then advertised it on Instagram, WhatsApp and by Word of Mouth.
We conducted the Among Us tournament on the 10th of January, 2021 with over 10 registrations. We were able to raise Rs 7000 for the village support project. We coordinated via WhatsApp groups and decided the winner based on a point-based system. We conducted four rounds, and the person with the greatest number of points at the end of the rounds received a cash prize. Subsequent to the Among Us competition we conducted a FIFA tournament on the 16th of Jan, where we had around 10-12 participants. We managed to raise close to Rs 9000. We had a single elimination tournament format, with each person choosing their own team. The winner of the tournament decided to donate the cash prize to the village support fundraiser too.
Among us and FIFA raised a substantial amount of money which helped make donations to the village of Kumbhalgarh. Even though we went through a lot of rough patches throughout the events such as deciding the dates or gathering people for the tournament, we resolved all the problems as a group.