Prologue

Well it all started with last year when we did a project that no one had faith could be done, but we pulled it off anyway, this year we wanted to do it again. Rtr. Miyuru chaired the project last year but this year we wanted to give it to someone new, so gave it to someone new Rtr. Fazeen.

The first thing we wanted to do is select a new orphanage because we didn’t want to go with the same place again even though it was a very nice place we wanted a little bit of change so this year we selected Jinnananda orphanage in Wellawatte which was close an accessible to everyone, we hoped what’s that this would allow everyone to attend the project

Last year’s was great but we didn’t have a lot of club attendance because the location was quite far away, all the way in kesbewa.

Kick Off

We started the project a little close but we still had about a month of planning and a month to initiate and run the project, it’s very important to start the project early because you need a lot of time to convince people and make them buy a gift and then there’s also the collecting part which takes another a whole week.

But this time we want to do a lot of “after sales” for the project we didn’t wanted end the project as soon as it was over, we wanted to make sure that everyone who bought a gift clearly understood that what they have done has gone a long way.

This time we had a great PR director Malesha, She had done a lot by creating a very unique themed posts which we were going to use all across the Secret Santa projects to ensure that everyone who see these posters knows exactly what this project is all about.

We started off by making an event page and making a WhatsApp group like last year. The idea was to carry out all of the activities we are social media as much as possible. We tagged them in posts and ask them whether they want to be a Secret Santa and not even three days after we launched the project officially we had over 20 gifts.

It was so wonderful and relaxing to know that people were still interested and people still love to give gifts during the Christmas season because this is what this whole project depends on, the people’s willing to be part of the Christmas spirit and season.

Each time a person gave a gift, we WhatsApped a messaged a poster personalizing with the name thanking them for volunteering to be a secret Santa further motivating them to keep the word. We also gave them two weeks deadline to buy the gift and then the members to set up collection points Muji and Azmin volunteered the houses in Mount Lavinia, and there offices as well Malshani volunteered IFS as a collection point as well

Dinithi from last year was a past Rotaract Member was still interested in collecting and giving gifts volunteer a large number of gifts this year as well

Collecting Gifts

Finally it was time to get on the road and start collecting gift, so every now and then we would go around walking Colombo collecting gifts from here and there and bringing them and loading them in my office.
Everyone at my office thought I’m a very lucky person to get so many gifts but this going out for me obviously they were for the kids!

The next thing is food and beverages we want the public to be a part of this event and therefore we encourage people to attend the event and also sponsor for the kids with food or beverages as such we collected not money but direct Food and Beverage supplies just three to four days before they went
Finally on the event day we all got up in the morning and visited them it was a half day visit but it was a very productive visit
We got the kids to draw something about how they felt about Christmas or about that gift and then got them to write their names and their ages and collected all these images that they drew during the event we also had participatory games such as public speaking and musical chairs, after the event we took all the photos and created a nice album

Post Project

We also took all the addresses from all the gift donors and created a database and then printed older addresses onto envelopes, a personalized message to each donor and included the drawing that the kid did and send them across due to the Postal Service being on overloaded during Christmas season we decided to send letters in January and by the 12th all the letters had been delivered and each and every person had received a letter