LoveFAD is an annual youth-led volunteerism project that provides gift-wrapping services at shopping malls island-wide during the Christmas season. In exchange for this service, shoppers are encouraged to donate at least $1. These funds help to support the work of LoveFAD’s adopted charities and their clients. For new volunteers of LoveFAD, they are required to attend a gift-wrapping workshop prior to the start of the event.
LoveFAD was started by a group of students as part of their Service-Learning project in Anderson Junior College back in 2007, in collaboration with The Salvation Army.
In recent years, LoveFAD have sought to reach out to more non-profit organisations, to help them raise funds and awareness.
The Highlights
LoveFAD 2017 was its tenth run and the team managed to raise a total of $23,000 for their adopted charities, Singapore Red Cross and Home Nursing Foundation. The volunteers wrapped 9,585 gifts at five shopping malls – namely Westgate, Jem, Waterway Point, Bedok Mall and Tampines Mall.
Since its inaugural run in 2007, LoveFAD has already raised $154,000 for various charities.
The Memories
Reflection #1 – The Challenges
Shortage of manpower in the planning committee.
With most of the planning committee joining the workforce this year, manpower was affected during the planning and execution stages. For example, during the planning process, the team was not able to focus much on publicity and this affected their pool of new volunteers during the actual event. In addition, booth setup and manning were also affected due to the lack of volunteers.
Lack of funding for their new webapp initiative.
To celebrate the tenth year of LoveFAD, the team has engaged a software engineer to develop a webapp for registration. It turned out to be a great investment as it has vastly improved the volunteers’ registration process (both for the user and administrator).
Despite successful applications of various funds, the team still fall short of the amount required to fund the development of the webapp. However, the team is confident that its cost can be recovered in future editions.
Reflection #2 – The Takeaways
Delegation and pooling of skills from people of all walks of life, is the key in accomplishing bigger tasks together.
This year, the team outsourced and delegated various tasks to their volunteers, which resulted in getting various sponsorships. For the first time since the project has started in 2007, the team managed to get logistic sponsors for tables and chairs at the booths in the shopping malls. Another volunteer also helped the team to schedule social media posts and craft compelling messages in keeping their followers updated and engaged throughout the entire event.
Use technology whenever possible and set long term goals.
With the long term goal in mind for LoveFAD (i.e. being sustainable for as long as possible), the team went ahead to develop a webapp which had proven to be effective but costly.
Even though the webapp has garnered praises from their volunteers and saved a lot of processing time for the volunteer registration team, there is still much fine-tuning to do for the next edition of LoveFAD in 2018.
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