IAIP Volunteer Day

IAIP – Volunteer Day

October 16^th 2011

IAIP organized a Volunteer Day on Sunday October 16^th at Holiday Inn, Mumbai with the objective of encouraging members to come forward and volunteer for the society, evaluate their interests in various activities & committees, gain insights from their existing society leaders and volunteers, share experience with each other and have fun networking. The session helped volunteers gain new perspectives and explore own strengths. Surely members would come out more committed, connected, and creative in a collaborative work environment.

To make the session more interesting IAIP invited, Pratapaditya Chakravarty, popularly named PACO, to talk about volunteerism, building and uniting teams for a common cause, expanding horizon on both professional as well as personal fronts. He started with the fact that The Eiffel Tower was build to demonstrate that Iron is lighter than stone by a group of people, who were all volunteers! The team lead by Gustave Eiffel included 50 engineers, 100 Iron workers, 120 construction workers. The 324 metre & 108 stories tower took 18,038 pieces of metal, 2.5mn rivets and 60MT of paint.

So all the volunteers who attended the session were divided into 6 groups and given a task to build a replica of Eiffel Tower using wheat flour, which combined with water becomes binding material, spaghetti representative of iron structure, and water colors. The time allotted – 20 minutes. All the members discussed, designed, planned, collaborated and built the coveted Tower. See the photographs in the slideshow. Everybody thoroughly enjoyed.

[slideshow]

Through this fun session PACO passed on some very memorable messages on volunteerism:

• Volunteering gives you an opportunity to make a difference to people’s lives in your community.
• —Volunteering can enhance your future employment prospects and enable employers to see that you have developed the necessary skills you may need in their organization.
• Volunteering gives you a chance to get experience in a field you would like to work in.
• Volunteering gives you the chance to meet people both from within and outside the industry who you would not normally come across.
• Volunteering gives you the opportunity to test out potential career choices.
• Volunteering provides you with development opportunities that are not always possible with paid employment, for example; communication and people skills, organizational and time management skills, planning and budgeting skills.
• Volunteering is fun and fulfilling, allowing you to experience many diverse opportunities not always available to you elsewhere.

So what are you waiting for? Take a leap. Get in touch with your society leaders and active volunteers.

About PACO:

Pratapaditya Chakravarty, popularly known as PACO, has more than a decade of experience in exceeding SLAs and C-Sat scores for internal and external customers and has been associated with EDGE – The Learning Academy, Reliance Capital Asset Management Co. His specialties are project management, performance consulting, training, instruction design, content development, occupational standards, conceptualizing & running corporate university.