It must be said again for my incredible team, the very ones who backed me up in organising MAD Project Myanmar, that an incredible amount of hours went into it. Firstly, the fact that we all held full time jobs made it very, very difficult already to meet, discuss, organise, and actually have time TO DO!!!
The initial idea was sparked by brainwave Money Tree Sri Hartamas owner, Ms Money Penny in December 2012 but of course, the Christmas and Chinese New Year holidays completely threw us off and nothing was done till February. So in actual fact, we had close to 2 months of random organising activities happening between the 3 of us – Money Penny, Val and myself.
Money Penny runs the Money Tree, a Financial Literacy Learning Centre for Children at Sri Hartamas. The courses that she has for kids are amazing. I wish I had learnt all about money and everything that goes around it when I was a kid. Never too late so we’ve been bugging her to start courses for adults. Penny is also passionate about property investments and helping the less fortunate kids.
Val is a professional Story Teller (kid’s story telling) and a professional English Language Consultant. She also has 2 boys and a dog, and bakes some mean cookies.
Me? Well, I work full time for a very niche industry, I blog at Mamapumpkin that makes me a tidy side income, and I raise my 2 girls.
Between the 3 of us, we had exactly 3 face-to-face meetings and the rest of the organisation was done via WhatsApp and emails as each of us divided our individual tasks between ourselves.
Towards the last week before the event, we roped in 2 kids to help us with the MAD logo design and physical labour to pull everything together. We had the support of Lynette, Shen and Suzanne (all big supporters of the Children of Myanmar and all 3 who’ve been to see the kids in Myanmar first hand) who helped us out on our last day before the event and on event day itself.
The task was phenomenal. Designing the MAD logo, designing the bag, ordering the bags, designing the trophy, ordering the trophy, picking it up, searching for sponsorships to fill the goody bags and to award the winners with prizes…………… (and before I forget, THANK YOU JACSS for the MPH Book Vouchers for the 3 big winners!!! I assure you they have made full use of them and LOVED THEM!!!)………………., finding a venue to host the event, organising with venue landlord in organising the event, working within space and rule constraints, taking orders for participants, liaising and communicating with participants, administrating participants, collecting money for the table bookings and coordinating the mechanism of the competition for the days sales, designing the certificates, printing them, finding a photographer, designing the buntings and posters, organising them for print, coordinating with all the sponsors, printing vouchers on behalf of some of our sponsors, dealing with the press, buying photo frames and other items we needed for the event, organising balloons, picking them up, organising lunch for the participants, collecting them, sourcing for a PA system because the event venue did not have one…….oh, trust me, there was just TONS to do.
And not only was it a monumental task organising the event on top of our DAY JOBS (of which demanded at least 10-12 hours of me daily during the week!), some of us still had kids to care for on any normal day AND Val and I had our kids participating too!!! What the heck did this mean??? It meant we had to supervise our kids for their participation too!!! For example, Val’s kid sold cookies. Well, baking cookies took even more of Val’s time!!! At one point, we were about to have mental breakdowns!!
It was just CRAZY and I’ve only now just recuperated from it. I guess that means it took me a month. Soon, we will send out the post mortem forms – well, give me a break. Better late than never, right? So I hope those of you who are blog readers WILL make an effort to fill out those forms so we know how we can make next year’s event bigger and better.
Here are some behind the scenes shots of our journey the day before:
Penny coordinating with some of our sponsors and designing the sales sheets for the participants.
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The MAD bags that Penny so kindly sponsored for the kids to take home. Thank you too to the printer and maker of the MAD bags who gave this to us at cost. It’s a great cotton bag! Thank you to Mel and Shen for filling the bags.
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Lynette (whom I’ve known for almost 30 years) sharing a light moment with Val. In the background are Mel and Shen unwrapping the photo frames to be ready for framing the Children of Myanmar’s art work.
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Val explaining to her husband why she would be late that night……
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Shen cutting out table numbers
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The certificates that Val’s husband spent hours through the wee hours of the morning designing, put together from all the Children of Myanmar’s art work along the border. These certificates took about half an hour to print each due to spooling large files.
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At midnight the 7th April 2013, the tables were ready!
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Deciding where the stage should go and where the projector screen was best placed after midnight after which I went home to put together the slide show which cost me to finally put my head down to sleep at 4.30am only to wake at 7.30am to pack everything out and head out for event day!
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10am and we were ready for business!!! (exactly 24 hours after we started work the previous day)
We raised RM27,000 – about RM7,000 came from T1’s table as she had some very generous sponsors.
All in all, a job well done and we were extremely pleased with the result because this only meant RM27,000 more to the Children of Myanmar and in following posts, I will share with you exactly how this money will be used for their education since we are practically done with renovating their homes to make them livable.
Thank you to all my friends who came, thank you to all of your who donated money whether you were there or not, THANK YOU for all your support in this project supporting the Children of Myanmar.
And after all this, there were still people who had the nerve to wonder if we were really sending the money to Myanmar…..people who had complaints about the event yet complained behind my back and not to my face. Sigh. Why?
**************************************************************************Who is Mamapumpkin?
Mamapumpkin spent 7 years in London committing crimes to gain her Bartlett degree in Architecture. She then spent 7 years as a Stay At Home Mom raising her children as documented in this blog of over 15 years thereafter returning to the Corporate World stronger than ever as the Country Director of a British Multinational. She sets out to prove to all, that you can have anything and everything that you want; if you have that fire of desire burning within and the drive to work hard. Even better with much love.
Mamapumpkin has not only grown corporate businesses successfully in the past but has grown not one but TWO network marketing businesses in the notorious MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) industry, achieving success in under 2 years. She believes in the MLM business model but realises the DRASTIC PITFALLS and great stigma attached to it, understanding EXACTLY WHY the majority would shy away (or RUN for their lives) from ANY MLM business. But open your eyes and take time to understand it intellectually, remove your hang-ups, confirm your research, and you may just want to seize an opportunity. She did. And no, she never went about chasing people for sales. She had a sophisticated system work for her through technology and a smartphone.
She now impacts lives authentically with proven strategies amassed through the last decade of her own transformation offering online coaching programmes and always supports the underprivileged. She believes that we can all have a life of our own desires to enable real contribution into the world. But first, one needs to understand what this all means.
A beautiful life without limits.
If you wish to learn some tools to propel your life forward guaranteed, be brave enough to make contact as her life's purpose is to build people. She operates through a discovery call after which she will commit to helping you. Or not.
Most lose out on an opportunity because they are afraid they would be sold to, conned or whatever fear resides in their brain without even trying. And that's on them.
Mamapumpkin is a living testimony that women really can have a lot. Being financially and time free has enabled her to travel the world anytime, anywhere, doing anything, and she spends most of her days with her children, having fun, and supporting others wherever she can. Also having fun.
