Riding The Wave with Rotaract Club of WCC

The Rotaract Club of Women’s Christian College (RCWCC) is renowned for its 25 years of unrelenting contribution towards empowering young women to become future leaders. This year, the Club has taken on an innovative scheme to tackle the quarantine, to serve the community and to develop future women leaders during the lockdown, through a series of online and offline events.

The beginning of club activities was marked by the Installation ceremony in July, titled ‘Aarambam,’ where all the Office Bearers of the year 2020 came together to take a pledge, vowing to serve the community to the best of their abilities. Once the most essential pillars of the club, the Office Bearers had come together, an orientation was conducted in the following weeks for the 2nd year students, to introduce them to the enthusiastic and energetic world of Rotaract.

As the students eagerly waited to take part in activities, the club quickly rolled out events for its members. One of the well-appreciated online events among the students was ‘Kadhaipoma’, organised as a ‘Celebration of our Elders,’ on 22 August, in connection with National Senior Citizens’ Day. It was organised to appreciate and acknowledge the love and support of elders in one’s family. In this event, grandparents of participants shared pieces of advice, their life experiences and nostalgic rides to their childhood. The club also organised various awareness programmes such as ‘Spread the Word’, an online event that shed light on different aspects of Mental Wellness. Another event ‘Arivom’, an initiative to raise awareness about cyber security and safe usage of social media was also held. Other initiatives worth mentioning are ‘Comienzo’, a scheme to tutor HIV-infected kids in 3 shelter homes and ‘Teach’, an initiative to teach English to underprivileged kids from schools in Madurai.

In addition to the said online events, the Rotaract Club of WCC, has also been consistently conducting offline events for its members, which has helped reduce the stress of attending online events and has been beneficial to students by encouraging them to engage with their community. One of the events conducted on World Food Day, ‘Pagirnthidu,’ encouraged participants to donate or sponsor one meal of the day to daily-wage workers like security guards, household servants, dhobis and maintenance staff who worked around their homes. The feedback received for this event was immensely positive, with students expressing their gratefulness at having got a chance to bring joy to someone else’s life. Similar to this, ‘Annamidu’ was conducted to encourage students to feed stray dogs and birds around their homes since it has been hard for animals to find food on the streets due to the lockdown. Yet another offline event that is worthy of being mentioned, is a part of ‘Project Jarvis’ a cyber security awareness campaign. The event titled ‘Arivom 2.0’ was an awareness event preceded by a webinar in which participants had to share information about internet safety, cyber bullying and related topics in the form of quotes or posters on their social media accounts. This was done everyday for a designated period of 10 days. This event witnessed the active participation of students of the club and raised considerable inquiry about safely navigating the internet.

Apart from various online and offline events, the club also helped break the mundane routine in students' lives through various competitions. Events on Independence Day became a combination of patriotism and talent when the club encouraged its members to showcase their creative and competitive spirit. The competitions ranged from writing poetry to singing songs on the theme ‘patriotism’. The aim of these events was to inculcate reverence and respect for our country. The events were encouraged by the students and enjoyed tremendous participation.

Office Bearers (OBs) endowed with the responsibility of organising events have been working hard to provide students with a meaningful experience. Some of the OBs think that the online medium has made conducting events easier. Sneha L V, one of the OBs, said, “Now, just a mail and a few calls are enough to confirm the presence of speakers at events”.

“Speakers attending the events also find it convenient as there is no need to travel.” she added. Though many of the OBs looked at these changes as a creative experience, they felt that the agendas of the club were reduced due to lack of proper interaction with students. “The club was created mainly to physically engage with the students in order to inspire them to serve our community and not all things can be done online”. This was one of their many concerns while planning for club activities for the future.

“I have been part of the Rotaract club since my first year in college. I am happy and enjoying the variety of seminars, workshops and events that are being presented. They are both meaningful and resourceful for the students. Even the choice of speakers for each event is a perfect fit and we highly appreciate the effort of the OBs,” said Atulya, one of the club members. Though many of the members felt something missing in their participation in online events, they enjoyed the limited events that were organised offline and found them helpful as well.

One of the faculty coordinators, Ms Jessila Malarvizhi said, “The Rotaract Club this year, is a potpourri of talented students who have risen like a phoenix to the challenge that is the COVID-19 pandemic. The Rotaract Club of WCC is extremely focussed and enthusiastic, bringing hope and happiness into many lives through their various activities”. She went on to praise the tireless efforts of the club in conducting exciting events with limited resources available to them during the lockdown. In the interview, she further discussed her initial apprehensions regarding the activities and how the club’s response eventually surprised her. “Initially, I was quite sceptical as RCWCC is known for reaching out to the society physically. But the RCWCC of 2020 simply rose to the occasion and found various other activities which can be done online,” she said. She ended the interview on a positive note saying, “Students are finding new ways of carrying out service, which is a positive approach to this new normal.”

Editor: Dainty W