A Journey to understand Failure

Introduction:

During our Amal Journey, we have been given the task to collect funds for Edhi Foundation. The purpose of this activity is to challenging our problem-solving skills to accept failure. The activity had to be carried out by the whole batch in their mega circles. We had to devise different ways to collect funds for Edhi foundation from people.

Plan # 1:

Our first strategy as a batch to collect the funds was to make posters to collect funds. This is the poster we designed:

We posted the poster on our social media accounts. We shared it with our WhatsApp groups. We hoped to collect a fair amount of funds, but we faced failure when people didn’t pay any heed to the poster. We waited for a week, and then we realized it’s better to make a new strategy than to adhere to the one which is failing.

Plan # 2:

For this, we merged our circle with circle number 7, which is led by Khawaja Muhammad Ali.

The idea of collecting funds via a poster didn’t work well, so we had to develop a new strategy. We decided to arrange a workshop to teach the usage of Microsoft Office covering Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to students. The fee to attend the workshop was 500 PKR. We were able to reach more people with this plan, and seven people attended the workshop.

(Picture of the workshop isn’t included because we weren’t able to get participants’ consent.)

This plan worked well. It wasn’t up to the mark with our expectations, but we were glad that we could collect some money.

The reflections of circle fellows are as below:

Saba Rauf (Circle Leader):

  1. The experience of collecting funds for a social cause was beautiful, and I felt like I was doing something beneficial for my society.

Usama Hasan:

  1. I tried to raise funds through social media advertisement and also by personal contact with my fellows, but everyone was appreciating, but no one was ready to take the initiative, so that was discouraging

Rabiya Arif:

  1. Social work has been one of my goals for some time, so I was more than happy and excited to work on this.

Muhammad Hammad Hassan:

  1. It was a unique experience of collecting the funds for the Edhi foundation as it was my first experience to collect for any relief organization; through it, I learned many lessons, including

Abeera Latif:

  1. For me, the experience of collecting funds was very new, so it acted as a challenge. I was excited to indulge in this challenge, but I was also afraid of the obstacles I will face. I have learned some things about myself at the end of it, which I didn’t know before. I realized I have better panic management than I give myself credit for.

Farman Khan:

  1. It was an excellent experience to work with a group to collect funds for the Edhi Foundation. I was very passionate and excited about this activity.

Conclusion:

All the circle members faced difficulty in persuading people personally for donations. The lack of response and donations from people dimmed down our enthusiasm, and our morale wavered. This experience made me feel the hardships Mr. Abdul Sattar Edhi must have faced when he started the Edhi foundation. The struggle of asking people for funds, convincing people that their money would not be misused, narrating to people again and again that this is not a fraud must have been nerve-wracking and exhausting. But then I also had a revelation that Ehdi.sb never gave up on his dreams and generosity of people despite all the hurtful things he had to face, and today we are working for the same foundation he built from scratch.

Failure is not permanent. It will dissolve in the air like it never existed. But what you learned from that failure and how you overcame it is permanent and will stay with you forever.

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a lost soul

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