Mega Project: Blog 2
Mental Health issues are very common in our society but unfortunately, we fail to acknowledge them. We do not consider a disease an illness if it is not physical or cannot be seen clearly. To spread awareness about this issue among our young people who face it the most and also neglect it, we initiated this series of webinars on mental health awareness. We have conducted two webinars till now and the response has been mind-blowing.
We invited three professional psychologists as guest speakers. They have their expertise in Clinical psychology and currently serving at hospitals. They are also lecturers at GCUF, which has also proved very beneficial as they have the experience of dealing with young minds in both educational and clinical settings. They related their discussion points to real-life examples, which intrigued the interest of the audience and brought a plethora of questions.
Moving onto our audience, we did not expect this huge number of people but our audience totally amazed us. Around 110 people in total joined our webinars and they have been an amazing support. Obviously, a teacher is not a teacher without students. Their keen attention to the speakers, their active participation, questions, and their engagement is what made this webinar more successful and gave us enough motivation to bring more activities. They asked very thoughtful questions from the speakers and some of them even didn’t know that these behavioral aspects were actually called mental disorders because as other people of the society, many of them have not considered an extremely bad mood, a depression. Therefore, they were amazed to know that they too have some mental illness.
We integrated a mini-survey in the Registration forms and Exit Ticket. We also took feedback from the participants on our Instagram polls and the stats were amazing. We were so overwhelmed to see that our audience has actually learned something from these webinars and they have loved it and are also willing to attend our next webinar.
We created a Mental Health Awareness Group on Facebook and Whatsapp and also created an Instagram page. On Facebook and Instagram, we share content that aims at spreading awareness among our youth and tell them that these issues are very common and they are not alone in their struggle. We, too, have similar problems. The purpose of our Facebook is also to provide a platform to other people where they can share their problems and whatever bothers them. Our admins are always available to our group members. They will give them their time to just listen to them. As we know that:
Bottling up emotions is what causes depression and anxiety while letting it all come out lessens the chances of going into depression.
Not only our Circle members, but our Psychologists were also ready to help our audience. They asked us to share their contact details with our audience and they also confirmed their availability and willingness to listen to the problems of our audience and provision of free counseling.
The attendance in both webinars has been outstanding. The success of our first webinar led to an amazing attendance in the second webinar too, which itself shows that people really liked it and wanted to know more about these issues that we discussed earlier in our first webinar.
Professionalism in our webinars was admired by our fellows. The way we conducted it and managed the time, audience, and questions was a good part of it. Our active speakers and their thought-provoking questions and relatable examples shook our audience because all those relatable questions and examples hit them at their heart. Hence, it was a kind of self-reflection that evoked our emotions. Some of those questions were:
- What you “learned” from the tragedy of your life?
- What was the last thing you did without expecting any reward in return?
- What were the books or personalities that inspired you?
These questions pushed the audience to think about themselves and how they have been leading their lives.
Challenges:
If you have no challenges, that means you have not done anything remarkable.
Although we have conducted our two webinars successfully and are very hopeful and excited for the upcoming webinar, this success and enthusiasm don’t mean that we did not face any challenges.
The biggest challenge which we faced was time management. One speaker spoke for around 30 minutes and the other barely spoke for 15 minutes. The intended time for the webinar was 90 minutes; 6 to 7:30 pm, but our audience was too excited to leave and stayed for 120 minutes. They had many questions and they wanted to clear their confusion. Considering their requests to answer their questions, we had to stay a little longer. Due to that 11 out of 77 people left without filling the exit ticket. To overcome this issue, we strictly followed the limits. We gave the speakers a time limit of 20 minutes, in which they had to complete their part and so they did.
In our first webinar, our guest speaker started answering the questions on her own while reading from the chat, which created a lot of mess. There were hundreds of messages in the chat and as we were approaching the end of the webinar, many people were turning on their mics to ask questions whose messages were ignored in that plethora of messages. This also disrupted the discipline. To overcome this problem in our second webinar, where we strictly followed the time. We disabled the chat and announced a 30-minute question and answer session and told the audience at the very start of the webinar that they will be given the time to ask questions. Before the Q/A session, we shared the exit ticket link with the audience. This helped us a lot in maintaining discipline and keeping a record of attendance. The audience was genuinely happy that they got a good interactive session.
We also introduced our Facebook platform to ask and share anything. Previously we had 30 members in our group. Sharing this also increased our Facebook group audience to 80 members.
Roles and Responsibilities:
Each Circle member has played a significant role in the Mega Project. I feel immensely proud in saying that each member has done every task assigned to them by me. Mariam Mehardin did the meetings with psychologists and arranged for us, three professionals. She also communicated all our requirements to them and shared critical feedback which helped us in improving our second webinar. Khadija put a lot of effort into making the registration form. She also incorporated the feedback and updated the form afterward. Rizwan made an amazing poster, which helped us in marketing and we reached a maximum audience through it. He is also working on making certificate templates. I, myself, hosted the webinars and wrote thank you notes to the guest speakers and audience. I also managed the Instagram page, motivated and pushed my Circle members, and made sure everybody did his work on time. Abubakar has been a great help in creating the WhatsApp group, adding all the applicants of the webinar, sharing the meeting link with them, and recording the meeting. Although we all reached out to people, Anosha remarkably helped us a lot in reaching the maximum number of people on all our social media platforms. She also regularly posts in our Facebook group. Shoaib made exit tickets for the webinars. He also kept a record of the stats. Shaheryar kept a record of attendance both from exit tickets and participant screenshots.
Feedback:
The feedback that we received from our audience showed the impact of these webinars which made us so humble. We were so glad to know that people actually liked our webinars. Their genuine feedback is what motivated us a lot. The webinars provided awareness to those who didn’t know that mental illness is a serious problem.
We had more audience in our second webinar which itself speaks to the impact it created earlier. People came to know and understand their complex behavior and they were impressed by our efforts and generosity to offer them help for a lifetime. The following feedback is from our audience which speaks more than I could.
Collaboration:
We collaborated with The Educators and The Barkat foundation; which is a non-profit organization and aims at educating the youth. We will also be providing certificates to our audience on the basis of a pre-set criteria, which is attending all three sessions.
Sustainability of our project:
Our guest speaker, Miss Tayyba was kind enough to share her contact details with the audience to provide help in this regard in the future also. Our Facebook group’s aim is to provide moral support to people who are facing mental health issues. We volunteered for a lifelong position to help any person who is facing any issue. We will listen to them without being judgemental. We will also arrange activities in our group to engage our audience. These will be fun activities on Bait-Bazi, Bookclubs, general discussions on any topic, stress releasing exercises, etc. that we have planned and are going to conduct once a month on each Saturday.
In a nutshell, I would say this journey has been like a roller coaster ride which had its ups and downs but overall each of us is loving taking the ride.