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Magic on a Shoestring
By Mitchell Beer | April 10, 2010
We’re returning to The Edge after a longer absence than we expected! In the next couple of weeks, watch this space for one of our clients’ insights on the cost of not bringing in professional support to capture conference content effectively, plus news on our move to a virtual office.)
Today, I plan to spend my Saturday at a high school in Ottawa’s Alta Vista neighbourhood, learning state-of-the-art science from nearly 300 local high school students.
When I first set foot at the Ottawa Regional Science Fair (ORSF) two years ago, I had no idea I was walking into a new volunteer commitment. Rachel had entered her Grade 8 science project, Fibre on Fire, and I was just another proud dad. Prouder still, when she took the gold medal in the junior health sciences division and won one of 11 invitations to the 2008 Canada-Wide Science Fair.
But on the day of the regional fair, what I saw onsite was magic on a shoestring: a smart, sophisticated event carried off by a group of overstretched volunteers with no formal meetings experience, severely limited funds, but just enough heart and duct tape to get the job done. The organization was brilliant under the circumstances, but the day belonged to the students: The finalists who went to the Canada-Wide included one senior who was working on a new detection method for heart disease, and another who set out to prove that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had understated the potential for sea level rise due to global warming.
For anyone in our industry, the sequel to this story should be obvious: the event I’ve just described should not be able to sustain itself. But we’re about to begin planning the 50th anniversary ORSF for 2011, and several of the volunteers on the committee have been there for 12 to 15 years.
Before volunteering for the ORSF, I wanted to be sure that Rachel’s science fair days were done—parents often help out while their kids are involved, but I didn’t want Rachel or anyone else to have to wonder about a possible conflict. Once she decided that her future lay in fine woodworking (as Karen asks, how many 16-year-old girls are 6’2” and have their own collection of power tools?), I signed up as the ORSF’s sponsorship liaison.
Several months later, the sponsorships are in place, and the Ottawa Regional Science Fair has drawn more than 200 projects from Grade 7-12 students across the region. The doors open at Hillcrest High School at 09:00, judging takes place through the day, and winners will be announced by dinnertime. But if you’d been there yesterday, you would have seen the following ingredients:
• Just over a dozen volunteers
• A high school that couldn’t give us full access until about 15:30
• Set-up to be done in long, narrow hallways on two floors with old, heavy, six-foot tables and no elevator
• A couple of hundred avid students and their parents arriving with projects at 16:30, all of whom had to register, set up, and have their displays safety checked before they could leave
• A volunteer registration coordinator who stepped away 24 hours out after learning that someone had organized a surprise birthday party in her honour. (I mention this not as a criticism—I think she did the right thing—but because this was a twist I hadn’t encountered in 25 years onsite.)
Despite much gnashing of teeth behind the registration desk, and dozens of very patient students and parents lining the halls while we carted and set tables and laid power bars, we got the whole facility organized in about 3.5 hours. Magic on a shoestring. And the real magic begins in a couple of hours.
Topics: Meeting Design, Other |