[originally published 16th November 2015]
October 17th and 18th took place the conference for new members of AIESEC Sevilla. I was fortunate to work with a team of fantastic people.
Together we created the concept / main purpose that gave name to the conference: Make it Grow!
The president of the local committee asked me to be the chairwoman of the conference with the purpose to achive the followings results:
– Create culture: making new members connect with the WHY of AIESEC. – Look beyond the surface: guide new members into an introspective process to discover their WHY of living, their dreams. – Create expectation of growth: to present their AIESEC experience as the platform to achieve their dreams, their WHY of life. – Inspire the Organizational Conference Team: creating the mood, maintaining team atmosphere and energy.
I’m so happy to had had this opportunity because it was an amazing experience. I want to share with you some ideas and strategies that I used to organize and create the content of my speaches. Hope it help you to be inspire if some day you want to do something similar.
1. First of all I made an introspective review of my life experience. To think deep what of my experiences (inside and outside AIESEC) makes me grow and keeping me into desire to continue getting better. It takes time so you have to create a relaxing moment during your journey to work on it.
2. When you did it, you have to select which of these ideas can be useful for inspiring others to do great things. Write them down, creating a sketch of main ideas and anecdotes.
3. Review the agenda. Only knowing and understanding the entire agenda will make you able to create the content of your speach having a natural progress which connect at the same time with the rest of the content that is going to be share at the conference.
The agenda was divided in two main frameworks: First day: Discover; Second day: Explore.
So following the idea of “Make it Grow!” I decided to create two environments: Primary school & Playground for the first day (Discover) and The Universe for the sencond day (Explore).
The reason about these two pics are:
Primary school & Playground: it’s an experience everyone of the delegates who was going to attend the conference had lived in their lives. Being at primary school or in a playground means a moment in our lifes where we aren’t afraid to learn, have fun and discover.
The Universe: since the beginning of the humanity we have the condition and the desire to explore. The universe is an explample of it. Something that we still don’t know but we want to discover exploring it.
Also, in a personal perspective, the universe is what makes me feel brave and strong when I am down, sad, tired or wihout energy. Because it makes me feel so small but at the same time as a miracle. Because I am part of a huge and amazing environment. Something so huge that we even don’t know the dimension or size of it. But that exist and it is real. So it makes me feel and believe that everything is possible if you really go for it. So with this idea I invited the delegates to explore what they wanted for their for their experience.
4. Create an outline for each speach you have to deliver. (This is the one we used):
To complete the outline is essential and so useful to organize and make clear the content of your dynamic or speach.
5. To make delegates connect easly with the topic is also great idea to create an environment that makes them dive more on it.
If you want to know if they really understood the contents or what they have learned, you can make a dynamic making them main actors of it.
Another idea I find great is to give delegates the space to think what is their opinion about one topic and to share it. It’s an exercise that makes people think by themselves, not only listen and nod like being sheeps. And thanks to this kind of activities everyone can learn from each different opinion.
Here three pictures of the conference that shows it. As you can see, to made the environment of the second day more into Universe, we hanged stars around the room.
