“A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step”. My first step was applying to Laidlaw Programme back in March 2021, and I did not expect that I would travel across the world to lead a project during then. But I did, this summer, and I had a phenomenal experience, culturally and professionally and I’m grateful for these 6 weeks.

Week 1 and 2 - re_searching and defining our problem

During our first meeting, I had the chance to meet and greet all scholars, which was very exciting. I was still on my vacation period during that first week, so working around my schedule is something I struggled with. This slowly affected my motivation to work during the two weeks, when we were virtually discussing the project and researching. Desktop research is what we mostly executed, along with meeting a team of two from Ecolana. However, I do feel that we could grasp more if we had been on-site or if our organisation was flexible enough to help us get access to a few app users to carry out focus groups. The training sessions were helpful to a certain extent to recap my knowledge of Design Thinking; we use a similar concept in our engineering projects. During the second week, we came up with some ideas for our solution, some ambitious ones too, however, we did not finalise anything during that week. During that time, while I was excited to go to Mexico City, I was slightly worried to go on-site with no solid plan.

Week 3 and 4 - re_cruiting and planning

Looking back at it now, I am glad that we didn’t have a solid plan, as we made a lot of drastic changes during weeks 3 and 4. During our second meeting with our organisation, they were not happy that our ideas did not match their schedule and their planned events, so we had to pitch new ideas that would satisfy us both. Painting a mural and creating an offline-to-online opportunity would attract a wide range of audiences, which is ideal for app promotion (plus, it did not require many Spanish skills, which worked in our favour!). Ecolana wanted us to provide ideas and strategies to make their pop-up stands more attractive. In addition to this, we also created prototypes for outreach packs we had planned from the start.

The main focus for these two weeks was the volunteer recruitment campaign. We created two series of 3 posts (6 posts in total), created a registration form, added links to common Linktree and an email sent out to a pool of volunteers.

Weeks 5 and 6 - re_acting

During this first week of re_acting, we spent most working hours painting the mural. We started early and ended well in advance for the paint to dry. Penelope and I decided to create an engagement strategy and went one step further by also working on a media strategy, including ideas for outreach, promotions, and social media posts. We had very minimal engagement from the volunteers. At the start of the week, we were thrilled that we had 14 volunteers sign up for our project, and by the end of the project, we only had four actively participating individuals. Lack of communication from their side was one of the few reasons, and this may have been due to their confidence in English skills. While this was completely understandable, we tried our best by arranging brainstorming sessions for them, where they could discuss ideas among themselves which could have easily been in Spanish, however, their commitment was not up to our standards.

Overall, I had a wonderful experience, learnt how to overcome various obstacles in project management and planning, and met and worked with great scholars. And lastly, my highlight of this journey will remain the sustainability festival where the majority of the projects/organisations came together as one. While the turnout was not as big as we hoped, we ensured engagement as much as possible at our stand, improvising along the way.