Week 4 was an important step for our project because we created a prototype for the short and long term plans that we had visualised after understanding the issue of volunteer retention rates at Casa. On Thursday, our team presented to Casa Surco’s management on our proposals, creating slides which were translated by the volunteers into Spanish and practicing our pitch. By learning to think through the pain points and happy points that the management at Casa would have, we empathised and put ourselves in the shoes of those we were presenting to. We framed our suggestions in terms of understanding and emphasising what would be useful for the organisation and the volunteers. 

We were pleased that the management appreciated our ideas, and it was lovely to co-create the solutions with the Casa volunteers as well. Through discussing the long term plan for creating teams of Alpaca and Llama volunteers to distinguish between short term and long term volunteers, we were able to come up with a better way of allowing the volunteers to graduate to be a Llama after 3 months, integrating this into the existing system of the school of volunteers. Callysta and I worked well together and we both were open to the ideas from those within Casa by adapting our ideas to suit the specific context of Casa. Moving forwards, our next steps are exciting - to prepare the logistics of the event we will host as well as creating a manual for the challenges system that we would like to implement.