Participation – Citizenship Coursework

In the summer, my class decided to run a charity stall to raise money for our house charity, The British Heart Foundation. I knew someone that recently underwent a triple heart bypass and thought that raising money for such a cause that could help to extend peoples life was an excellent idea. The temperature at school was becoming unbearable so I suggested that a great way to earn money selling something that people need would be to run an ice-cream stall outside the picnic area where the majority of the school eat their lunch.

Everyone agreed that it was a good idea but we came across the problem of finding a price that we could agree on. So we decided to do some market research and some members of my class organised a questionnaire in which students at our school were asked questions about their favourite flavours or how much they would be willing to pay for one ice cream. We discovered that most people enjoyed strawberry, vanilla and mint chocolate chip ice cream and that they would pay around 50p for one ice cream with extra toppings.

Everyone in my class had a role in participation, whether it was finding a place to store 30 tubs of ice cream or organising security so that people didn’t try to get ice cream without paying. We all had to bring in one litre tub each and we stored them in the freezer. Buying ice cream wasn’t a problem for most, however I personally found it hard to find mint chocolate chip ice cream and ended up buying plain mint ice cream instead. Also in the hot weather, some people’s generators had given in and their freezers had broken, so I offered to store some extra tubs in my freezer for those who didn’t have room.

My main role was organising what stuff we needed and who was supplying it. I brought in scoopers and cool bags to place the ice cream in when we were selling it so that it didn’t melt. Melting ice cream didn’t become a problem as the dinner ladies kindly offered to place a fridge outside the canteen with an extension lead to keep it running so that we could store some ice cream in the fridge outside.

I also had another role in being a “scooper” and making the ice creams for people to buy, at the same time I had to keep an eye on people trying to skip the queue. I enjoyed being a scooper and in my opinion it was one of the better roles of the task, we even brought in music to motivate the scoopers and entertain people waiting in the queue.

The disadvantage of being a scooper would probably be that after scooping for 1hr and 10 minutes my hand felt numb and I couldn’t move it. However the customers seemed to love it, probably because it was such a sweaty day and they needed something to cool them off, even the head teacher came down to buy some ice creams. People who bought ice creams from our stall then told their friends, a lot of people bought more than one!

There was some quarrelling when the people who were supposed to be running the stall didn’t show up or their friends kept taking free scoops or abusing our “extra topping service” by pilling the toppings on. Although after they did this they did drop their ice cream on the floor, which serves them right. And they weren’t the only ones, because people kept dropping them on the floor it encouraged wasps, and we also lost profit, as we had to give them a new one.

When the end of lunch drew near, I helped to count the money made in the day, this made me feel very responsible and trusted with so much money. There was also a lot of cleaning up to do, as well as putting back the tables, cleaning the cool bags and counting our profit. We made approximately �150 pounds on the first day and because it was successful we were approached to do it again the next day.

The second time around we knew where we went wrong last time and how to make our stall more efficient. This time I helped to re-decorate the stalls, make signs to place around the school and put leaflets in the registers to remind people to bring their money to school for a second time. We also read out a notice in assembly.

This time a lot more people came to buy stuff because the weather was warmer, and those who forgot their money yesterday brought it this time. At the end of the day we raised a further �172 pounds, and astonishing amount of money for one lunchtime. The school was very pleased and we got a lot of credit for our charity work. On the third day we decided instead of selling the leftovers to give everyone one each and we invited another form to join us. It was nice for me because it was actually my last day at that school. Afterwards we presented the canteen staff with flowers to thank them for giving us freezer space.

Our head teacher called it “a huge success” and many people wished there had been something like it when we had the hottest day in 20 years. Overall it was a good two days and we didn’t come across too many problems other than minor disagreements about staff rotas on the scooping table and we made a lot of money. They said that it is likely they will do it again next year, if I was still there I would defiantly suggest it, then next time we could sell something else like balloons or badges at the same time.