Met with representatives from various governmental agencies and learned the inner workings of the North Carolina Government!

The service project I decided to do was on connecting the community and youth to local policymakers firsthand. Pairing up with my local Chapel Hill Youth Council, I hosted the Town Council Candidate Q&A Forum. Planning for the event was a lot of work. When tackling the event preparation, I split my group into 3 teams: Event Planning, Outreach, and Media. Within the event planning team, I worked with members of my Youth Council to set up the event venue (Chapel Hill Public Library), the time (6:30 PM on October 20th), and the event questions. Pasted down below is the google doc of tasks that I split up with members. As for setting up the event, I spent a week getting in touch with all the candidates through emails and social media. https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Ngz01p9iWsD34yDoFVzZe5XzxnTjJxC851Nh666eYGM/edit?tab=t.0

Leading up to the Town Council Candidate Forum, I guided the Chapel Hill Youth Council in organizing table advertising at local high schools, including East Chapel Hill High School and Carrboro High School, to promote the event and encourage youth participation. In addition to school tabling, I led the outreach team which distributed flyers around town with event details and managed the Chapel Hill Youth Council Instagram account (@chyouthcouncil), where we created funny videos and informative posts to bring attention to the event. Through our social media presence, I was able to get upwards to 20.2 thousand people to gain attention on the event and the account.

I led the Chapel Hill Youth Council in orchestrating the town council candidate Q&A forum. I managed to get all 5 of the candidates to come to the event to get engaged with the public. Throughout the event, 10 delegates chapel hill youth council members asked questions to the candidates, and they give their thoughts on issues/policies they want to fix or promote. Afterwards, I led the Chapel Hill Youth Councils media team in crafting fun interviews of the candidates to help advocate the election to the general public which where then published to the social media platforms.

I believe the event was a huge success! I was able to organize many successful aspects of the event such as brining in Chapel Hill Parks and rec to the event, bringing out all 5 of the candidates, and being able to get around 30 youth members to be involved with policymaking firsthand. Throughout the preparation of the event, we were really successful because I was able to divide up many of the tasks into 3 specific teams: outreach, event coordinating, and media that greatly helped with getting the event set up on time.