Reflection 3

INTRODUCTION

Despite the fieldwork being carried out for the HTN group’s community service, the members have indeed realized that such meaningful activities should not cease with the ending of our project. Therefore, we decided to do something to deliver messages to the community while encouraging them to engage in relevant activities. 

Keeping in mind the purpose of obtaining an excellent result, the group members had proposed different ideas of serving the messages. For example, delivering pamphlets, creating social media pages and organizing campaign of relevant theme. After further discussion, we decided to create a social media page, either on Facebook or a blog, for the purpose of communication with the general public. The rationale is that it is a fairly cost-effective method and is likely to attain a satisfied result. 

Specifically, we intended to include our own experience in the social media page, in order to strike a responsive chord in the hearts of the community. As such, we planned to explore every facet of our project down to the finest detail, with the intention of impressing the general public with an interesting example, and encourage them to organize their own project while taking part in relevant activities. Concerning the purposes and aims, we were aware that the social media pages should be attractive to impress any random viewer. Thus we decided to display the information in the form of words, pictures and videos. We have also distributed relevant tasks to the group members, where some would do the construction of the social media page, while the others bear the responsibility of promoting it. 

Technically speaking, we wish to deliver the messages to any potential individual, regardless of his age, race and religion. However, we have instead set a target group of people for the delivery of our message so as to achieve the best desired effect. Our messages intended to be more affective on teenagers, particularly on students. We realized that this group of people have a rather flexible time and potential in providing actual service to the society, compared to working persons who are more likely to only make donations as a form of support. 

I am indeed passionately in favour of the plan of delivering messages to the community, since it is a good way to promote community service among the general public through an actual example of our own experience. I have also found myself to be more pleased at doing community service, as well as encouraging others to do so. 

BODY PARAGRAPH 

At the preliminary stage of implementing our plan, we consulted Mr Kelvin Ooi, who is the administrator of Ti-Ratana Welfare Society with regards to the plan. Mr Kelvin Ooi was supportive to our plan of serving messages to the community, but had made a requirement to us to not upload the photos to the social media pages. As he explained, children and old folks who are living in the welfare centre came from different backgrounds, some being unpleasant, thus it would be inappropriate to place them on the focus point. Indeed, what they need is caring, but not sympathy. 

SUPPORTING EVIDENCE 

Supporting evidence 1: 

 This is the blog created by the HTN group to serve our message to the community, with the link being www.helping-the-needy.blogspot.my. 

Supporting evidence 2: 

We have encouraged people around us to read our blog, hopefully to raise public awareness to serve the community. 

ACTIVITIES

With the understanding on the objects’ conditions and other considerations, we eventually decided to create a blog for the delivery of messages. As it is commonly noted that a blog can afford to have its content deliver by hundreds of servers around the world instead of just one. In particular, it is believed to be more effective to achieve our objectives than through a Facebook page since the readers will be able to concentrate on the contents of our post rather than being perfunctory with their ‘Likes’. 

We first described our community service project in the blog, without any single detail being omitted. We hope that the readers would be able to concern with the detailed objectives of our project, instead of looking only at the surface of things. The only difficulty that we faced in this process is that due to the restriction on uploading pictures, we will need to pay special attention to write in a way which has a similar effect of affecting the readers. However, we soon worked it out with the cooperation of the group members. 

We have also given a true account of our feelings and thoughts about our project, in order to produce a good writing that resonates the readers with our experience and lead them to a thoughtful consideration. In fact, we have also planned to manage the blog in a long term as we hope to keep the community updated on what we discovered from any other relevant projects. As such, we considered the blog as an outlet to help people do the right things for sake of the community. 

In order to expand the popularity of our blog, we first shared the link to other social media, such as Facebook and Twitter, for the attention of the others. Furthermore, we promoted the blog to people around us. With the creation of their awareness, we would also encourage them to share the information among their friends and relatives. Moreover, we were pleased to receive any feedback from the community, so that we can keep the information up to date, and make improvement on our service. 

CONCLUSION

It is well said that “You can't live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.” As such, we sincerely hope that through our own experience, we would be able to raise certain awareness among the public, and motivate their participation in doing community service. In fact, there are different areas that people may render their help to, such as donating to the needy, volunteering services to non-profit organizations in their activities, and even helping relevant associations to improve the plight of stray animals. It is an aim of our project to rouse the responsibility within the community to help each other, especially towards those in need.