VNC- Venturing into New Challenges: 2013

A few questions have arisen time and again when I meet people, recruit volunteers, conduct events or retrospect......why do we do it? How is Team VNC doing anything different from a tuition center?
The difference might be that we are teaching underprivileged kids for free....might be I say because the follow up question is that several NGOs are doing this....whats the difference?
My well wishers always tell me that I should grow and expand, raise funds and reach more slums.
To all of them I say please come and take initiative.....please come and try to implement the things that you want me to implement.

To all of them I ask - what do you conclude when you see 5-6 people carrying an institution on their shoulders for as long as we have at a certain level consistently without much external help?
For me the obvious answer is that the commitment is unquestionable!
Then why you ask don't we grow?
The conclusion there too is quite obvious - lack of time/resources.

At Team VNC we have an excellent habit that I am proud of, we do what we can and we promise only as much...no more. We receive a great deal of promises when people meet us and their conscience rises in the spur of the moment, these are often left unfulfilled.We have learned to get used to this over time, but I am glad that we have nor let that culture seep into us.
This is what we expect from our volunteers as well - give what you can, take what you need. No forced commitments and no lame promises.

As far as I am concerned, I am Team VNC. I am doing what makes me happy for my own sake and my own passion. I will continue to do this as long as I can.....Everything else, the questioning and criticism just does not matter.

I usually spend a lot of time on You Tube listening to music and watching videos. One day I came across a flash mob video and by the end of the day I had seen more than 30 such videos. That is how I got the idea of doing a flash mob with VNC volunteers and kids. Initially I was skeptical of the idea and didn’t discuss it with the team because I thought everyone will find it absurd and a waste of time. It was shelved for days.

In one of the meetings Kranthi was addressing the team and asked if we had any ideas for an event. There it came back to me and I gave the flash mob idea, I wasn’t expecting a good response but everyone liked the idea and asked me to do the initial research and start working on it.

In the next meeting, I addressed the team and we started the ground work with August 11^th as the tentative date and GVKOne as the venue.

I then spoke to Rohit who helped us in getting permissions for the venue. We got permissions from GVKOne and the date was finalized at August 11^th.

I wasn’t sure if all the volunteers could dance so I approached Vasavi’s Theme Ballet team (Murali, Avinash and Kranthi) and they agreed to help. In the next meet, with Chandrika’s help we got a Choreographer (Rajan).

I went along with Mrudula and the Theme Ballet team to the Infosys Campus to learn the dance steps from Rajan. The song and the dance steps were ready in a few days. The next challenge was to find more dancers and make them practice. Meanwhile Nomaan approached Ram and we had our banner ready, Dilip with the help of Hitesh arranged for transportation.

It took us about 3 weekends to teach the moves to kids and volunteers. A total of 35 dancers were on hand for the mob.

Another issue that came up was that the kids dint get enough motivation after a weeks practice and they didn’t want to do the mob. Kranthi, Rajeev and Prashanth had to do a lot of convincing to make the kids understand the importance of the event. They showed them a lot of videos of malls and other flash mobs to motivate them, but the impact wasn’t huge.

At the same time we realized that kids don’t have proper clothes to wear to the event. We then arranged for shirts in their favorite colors. The moment they saw the shirts they were really happy and also realized that we were serious and that they had to perform well.

In the dance, one of our hostel kids was supposed to be Gabbar Singh, he had to be dressed like a police officer. Mrudula and Vivek helped in arranging the attire.

We arranged for 3 to 4 cameras for the event, for photographs and videos. Vivek had arranged for speakers. A Facebook event was created and family and friends were invited.

Everything seemed perfect and in place until August 10^th (a day before the event) when we got the news that GVKOne is not allowing us to do the flash mob.

All of us were really low. There were a lot of thoughts running in our minds. We had invited a lot of people, given a press release, and booked the bus…. It was irreversible so we tried for other locations. But it was too late and we had to postpone the event by a week.

GVKOne was not working so the next best option for us was City Centre and after 3 days (on August 15^th) we got a written approval from City Centre. Everything was back to normal again.

August 17^th was the scheduled date and we did the mob successfully at around 5 PM in the evening. It was a Saturday and hence we had a big audience and a lot of attention. The crowd loved the performance and all of us were satisfied with the execution.

There is a lot that we have learnt from this event. Firstly that kids love anything that is creative, and if they are talented in things like dance, painting or Singing, we need to encourage them. We were really happy that the kids got a very good platform to showcase their talent. There are a lot of us who have never danced in life, all such people need to know that ABCD (Anybody can dance). Dance is not about how you perform; it is about how you enjoy when you do it.

Secondly that team work always helps enormously when we do such events. A person can win games, but a team can win championships.

Events like flash mobs will always get a lot of attention. The youth today spend a lot of time in malls and they find such things catchy. Facebook is the best platform to market anything. It is free and one generally has a lot of friends to spread the word. We used Facebook to showcase our work and to get more people involved with us.

After the event the likes on our page have increased and more people are interested to join us now. The more we talked about the event and the more pictures we took, more number of people started getting involved with us. You are your own advertiser.

The event was a great success and everyone was extremely supportive. This is how an idea that started from You Tube went on to become something real and valuable.