Project Name: Sneaker Drive Challenge
Community Agency: Toronto Loves Kicks
Project Leader: Angelica Alfonso
Project Description: Toronto Loves Kicks uses Youth and Sneaker Culture to design and deliver community events, educational programs and creative opportunities for brands, institutions and organizations to engage a unique and substantial demographic. Students will support the Sneaker Drive Challenge, which has the goal of engaging the dynamic demographic that the sneaker culture attracts, drawing attention to how “donating stuff creates jobs”. Students will help with research, outreach, and a social media campaign. torontoloveskicks.com
Victor Muthomi,
When I first heard of ARW, I was instantly curious and started researching more about it. Learning that it was a community-centered initiative around the city was very appealing and right then, I knew that it was ultimately something I wanted to be a part of. I applied for a research project and was honored to be assigned to one, the Sneaker Drive Challenge. At first I had many expectations including going out to the field and getting views about the challenge from people; conducting surveys; visiting Toronto Loves Kicks; assessing some of their previous projects; visiting Goodwill; learning firsthand how they conduct their drives or having a look at items previously donated as a benchmarking tool for the current drive (an important approach we use in our engineering projects) among other things.
Although most of what I expected did not come true, I had a fantastic time. The partners, Dion and Curt, were very welcoming, friendly and enthusiastic people. They had done their due diligence on the drive and ours was to supplement with more creative and ingenious ideas and helping them find potentially influential people/organizations on social media who would help start off the challenge at a high note. We worked in twos on the mainstream social media platforms, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. This turned out to be incredibly exciting, especially to me, since I learnt navigating through Instagram which I had never used before. That was fascinating! Afterwards was intense free brainstorming and idea generation, which is normally not my strongest suite due to the structured brainstorming and lateral thinking approach that we use in class projects, and that was a downer for me but I tried in various capacities. The atmosphere was relaxed, informal and exciting, which made the experience even better.
I learned a lot from the experience. One of the lessons was the value of teamwork in whatever capacity. This was a testament to the notion that a team is as good as the sum of its members. I had an amazing team including the partners and by the end of the experience we achieved a lot. The second thing that I came to appreciate greatly was the amount of nitty-gritty considerations and preparations go into the realization of such projects. Honestly, I never came to appreciate the logistics behind these humanitarian or goodwill causes until ARW, from looking up potential contacts, narrowing them down to those who best fit, coming up with ways to reach out to different groups of people, identifying appropriate incentives and structuring them so as to appeal to the largest demographic, identifying convenient locations for holding the drive, catering for the interests of the management such locations and seemingly the greatest, credibility of donors and staff in charge among others. This was an invaluable learning experience for me which I strongly believe changed my view and appreciation for such causes. Simply, it was priceless.
Now that it is behind me, I plan on following up on the drive after it is unveiled in mid-March onwards to keep track of its progress. I would also like to get involved in more CCP programs from now onwards to experience more of such or even better times. Honestly, I would not have spent my time more wisely than participating in that project last week and I am most certain that if I were to go back in time, I would still do the same thing all over again! Thank you for such a wonderful opportunity.
Thank you Victor for your reflection! We hope to see you at the CCP soon! 🙂
Centre for Community Partnerships 