I have taken up leading the communications and development teams of Zero Waste Youth USA during this past 5 months. The project I am working on is the organization of the Zero Waste Youth Convergence which will take place in San Francisco. The mission of the Zero Waste Youth Convergence is to provide students and young professionals with resources so they take the initiative to lead their communities to implement and accomplish sustainable and zero waste goals.
Working with other young professionals and seeing their passion for the concept of zero waste inspired me. I was very enthusiastic about the momentum we gained after laying the groundwork for the convergence during early December. I was also super satisfied with the work the communications team put on revamping our facebook page and revamping our newsletter.
However, we lost our momentum during the holiday break. I had gone back home to visit my family, and all I really had time for was drawing a new design for the website (which desperately needs to be redesigned!) and part-time managing the facebook page. I had also drafted some emails so a couple zero waste businesses I wanted to establish partnerships with, but I never sent them because I thought it was better to wait to ask for donations after the holidays. When we got back for our first meeting, it felt like we hadn't lost our momentum, and we had a great meeting with very new and exciting ideas. But new ideas wasn't what we needed, we needed to start moving forward with the scheduling of the convergence, raising money, and finding speakers.
I spoke with one of my peers and she raised her concern about the situation, so we decided to work together to compile a list of potential donors, create an email template, and begin to send letters. Finally some letters sent out was reinvigorating, and it motivated me to put more time to getting the team back together and bringing everyone's voice into the decision making. A few days later, I got an email from an organization saying they would commit to donate $1000 dollars to the convergence. Suddenly I felt like we were gaining momentum once again, and I felt the same thrill I did when we began to form this community.
Thus far, I have learned to start getting over my perfectionism. I realize that one of the things that stopped me from making decisions rapidly was that I was never satisfied with an outcome. There was always something I felt needed to get fixed. I was able to do this thanks to the encouragement that my team gave me, and how they help me stay grounded. I hope that I can take what I've learned the past few days to the Steemit community and narrate some of my experiences through this platform. I also consider writing this post a small victory as I finally got over overthinking what would be the perfect story to put as a first post. I look forward to joining this community of content creators!
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