Success planning work events

For those who don't know, I work for the 4-H Military Partnership/Operation: Military Kids Program at the California 4-H State Office at UC Davis near Sacramento. In December of 2009, my boss gave me a change to be in charge of two events for our Speak out for Military Kids (SOMK) project.  For all of our past SOMK events, I have always been the facilitator, while a co-worker of mine planed out the logistics, registration, contacting youth, and providing transportation if needed.  This time around, I was in charge of everything from facilitating to logistics to registration and so on. 


With the help of my co-workers, I worked the past three months to plan, market, and run two SOMK events.  Speak out for Military Kids is a project that gets military youth and youth from the community to come together to work on projects to help educate the general public about the hardships military youth and families go through, or work on projects that will help benefit the military to provide more services to military youth and their families.  For these two events, military and 4-H youth came together to create posters that will be mass produced and spread around all of California to educate the public about April, which is designated as the Month of the Military Child.  These posters are designed to get people in the community to see what military youth are feeling, and how to get involved to support the youth and their families. 

The first event was at the San Diego 4-H Office on February 27.  I drove down the day before to get down to San Diego, because I had to pick up two State 4-H Ambassadors from the airport, who had volunteered to help facilitate the workshop.  I showed them downtown San Diego, then we headed to the hotel.  The day of the event, it was raining.  This event went real well, but we did have two issues.  The first issue was the location.  The San Diego 4-H Office is in a gated county facility, and there was construction going on, so the access through the main gate was closed.  It was difficult for the attendees to find the side gates and to find the building.  One reason why we picked this office, was because it has a plotter, a big format printer, in which we can print the posters during the workshop.  The second problem was that the printer was being unresponsive to the printing jobs.  With this, the youth couldn't see their printed finished project.  About 15 minutes after the youth left to go home, we were able to get the printer working, so we printed posters for the State Ambassadors to have, and for me to have a copy.  Other then those two main issues, the workshop was a success, and everyone enjoyed themselves.  There was a logistics issue of attendance of the workshop.  Everyone who attended were from the Los Angeles area, the Inland Empire, and Ventura.  No one from the San Diego area, other than a State 4-H Ambassador, attended the workshop.  We chose San Diego for the 15 military instillations that are located within the city of San Diego and the surrounding communities.  We spend countless times marketing the workshop to the military instillations through our contacts, and got nothing.  

Our second workshop was held yesterday, March 6, at the California 4-H State Office at UC Davis.  I had to wake up at 4:30 in the morning to get on a plane to fly up to Sacramento to get to the workshop.  When I got their, my co-workers were all ready to go.  We set things up, and everyone showed up.  We had two no shows that day.  The workshop itself went real well, and moved a lot faster than the workshop in San Diego.  It was hard to get the youth to get involved and motivated to work on the project in the morning, but over time, they started to bond and were more active.  This workshop didn't have any problems, except the fact that the catering service for lunch doubled our order, which was way to much food for us, but my one co-worker was able to fix that situation for me.  After the workshop, i headed right back to the airport, and got home around 9:30 PM.  It was a very long day for me.

Now that the posters are created, we will now work with printing services at UC Davis and the San Diego 4-H Office to get these posters printed by the end of this month, so we can have them posted for all of April, the Month of the Military Child.


I do want to take this time to thank everyone who attended the workshop, and to thank my co-workers, State 4-H Ambassadors, and adult volunteers who helped make these workshops a success.  Without these people, I wouldn't have been able to plan these two events.  It makes me feel good that I was able to fully plan everything out, and have it be a great success.  With this, I have moved up with improvement with work, and I know more event planning for work is in my future, because of the success we had with these two workshops.