Given the end of the programme drawing near, it's been crucial this week to work cohesively as a team, to make as much progress as possible with our work. Next week, we will be delivering and presenting everything we've done, so there's been a lot of pressure to make quick and effective progress.

My team of Laidlaw Scholars and I have focused on creating our feminist puppet this week, to be the face of the Las Sabinas brand, and feature in the videos we make for their social media. Our ability to progress with this aspect of the project has been limited so far by difficulty accessing the supplies we need, but we finally (thankfully) acquired the last of our supplies this week. Funnily enough, none of the three of us have ever made a puppet from scratch before, so the process has been a steep learning curve for us all. We approached the challenge from the perspective of our individual skillsets and experience: I'm experienced with sewing, and one of my teammates is talented at crocheting, so we each took responsibility for the sections of the process that we were most competent with. Our third teammate hasn't done anything like this before, so we took the opportunity to teach her to sew, enabling even more effective collaboration on the puppet's creation. While there have been moments of stress and anxiety, in realising we've still been missing some supplies, or having difficulty deciphering instructions: it's been much easier to tackle these issues together, than trying to complete everything alone.

Alongside this, we've continued collaborating with our local volunteers to create infographic posts and videos to post on Las Sabinas' social media accounts. Our volunteers have been very helpful in creating content with us, and editing posts in line with the Las Sabinas brand. We've been in constant communication with representatives of Las Sabinas, who have given us useful feedback regarding what they like about our work, and their suggestions for how it could better match their vision for what the social media campaign will look like. Having built a good relationship with our volunteers and the Las Sabinas team has been vital in enabling this constant feedback loop, and this collaboration will ensure our project is most effective and successful in promoting Las Sabinas' programme to support survivors of gender-based violence.

This week, I've continued to be challenged in my patience. It's often difficult for me to delegate tasks to others, and to give control over them to someone else, but this week has demonstrated that my trust is not misplaced in my teammates. Even when they've struggled with a task, we've been able to communicate about it and support each other in completing it - just as they've supported me in the same way, when I've struggled. I've learnt that even though other people have different styles of working to me, it doesn't mean theirs are any less effective, and there's a lot I can learn from their methods of working too.

Next week, we still have a lot of progress to make with completing the final details of the feminist puppet, and using her to film and edit some more videos. I'm nervous to see whether we'll manage to complete it all in time, especially given that most of the week is dedicated to completing our final presentations and exit reports. But I'm hopeful to see the project come together, and to finish the Leadership in Action programme with a successful social media campaign that will really benefit the organisation 😊