Unitree is an NGO that works with disabled people in order to help this community to stay happy by making new friends from the volunteers and visitors at our sessions. Working as a volunteer at Unitree allows me to engage with a range of people suffering from disabilities such as down syndrome and other such special needs. We started as a small organization with 7 volunteers with the support of guardians or parents of people with special needs. We interacted with a large group of parents individually in respect to knowing about their mentality and how they are working at their best to keep their close ones happy. The start of something is always difficult and it was the same for us when we couldn’t collect resources and also couldn’t get more interviews by the parents as they didn’t want to discuss their personal life with others. As it was a first-time experience for all of us, it became difficult to face this as we had to find out a way to deal with this. We decided to split out the team and then go to the same set of parents and discuss that how we are trying to make this world a better place for our loved ones and reframed our approach so that they don’t feel that we are trying to interfere. We could have given up and would have tried to reach out to the other set of parents but we never wanted to miss out on this opportunity to expand behind our horizon. As we undertook this challenge, we allowed ourselves to take a new role and enhance our critical thinking, open-mindedness, and communication skills. Working with these new sets of skills makes me feel more confident and important to the community I am helping. Unitree session was a part of my leisure time and many times I would think of missing upon on the same due to my personal plans or academic reasons and even did that once or twice. Eventually, when I let myself in for the organization it made me feel like family wherein you get the immense amount of love when you bring smiles on numerous faces. Planning and initiating the thing helped us to achieve our aims as we had multiple plans to reach out to parents and allow their children or relatives to attend our sessions with their presence over there. Being an extrovert person has always allowed me to talk with others freely and always had the knowledge about how much to share and how to protect myself. Being an extrovert generally makes you compatible enough to work with other people hence I could allow myself to be flexible around special people in order to make them happy. Being very freely with them is not a good option always as they don’t feel comfortable while communicating with very friendly people. Working collaboratively helped us to know that well can we work together and what were the common things we observed or faced as an individual. The collaboration allowed us to know the range of perspectives on a single thing as every one of us took the challenges and interacted with others in a different way. There are around 7 million cases of down syndrome around the world and over a billion people are estimated to live with a form of disability. We as an organization might not have been able to reach out to all of them but working at our best, we were able to get around 20 children for every session we conducted. Knowing that this stands as a global issue, it is a moment of pride wherein I am able to be helpful for the community I live in and work for the betterment of the world. CAS experience allowed me to explore myself beyond the horizon in order to encounter personal growth.
The choices I made to perform this as my CAS experience allowed me to grow myself with empathy, compassion, and respect. Working around with a bunch of people with varied personalities gave me exposure to compassion by looking at how others feel and act in varied situations. Respecting is the best way while you are around others and also with yourself as that gives you a feeling of how do you accept yourself and others in contrasting conditions. Empathetic feel grows within when you experience a range of emotions while you are interacting with numerous people in day-to-day life. Experiencing around the Unitree family helped me attain all three attributes mentioned above.
Evidences:-
https://www.instagram.com/reel/COe_vrSBsf_/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CQ3abRWh_Iz/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link