Global Gala: Planning for success
One of the students who led the planning for Global Gala shares all the steps in putting together this annual event.
FIUTS students getting ready to dance at Global Gala
This past Saturday, FIUTS hosted the annual Global Gala to celebrate the end of the school year with friends from around the world. It was a huge success, with tickets sold out days in advance and 200 people attending. Thanks to everyone who came and danced the night away!
FIUTS student board members, facilitators, and friends at Global Gala. Photos by Juliet Le Huang
This event is always a lot of fun, but like all big events, it also takes a lot of work to plan and prepare for it! FIUTS students take on leadership roles in planning Global Gala, and have a chance to learn a lot during the process. This blog post, written by FIUTS Student Board member and Global Gala co-chair Xinglu Yao, describes the process of putting the whole thing together.
The whole Gala planning process was intensive and fun. We were glad to have a group of dedicated team members work together. In February, we started off deciding a cultural themes and venues. We decided to have a Brazilian theme. To better communicate the ideas to the audience, we named it "Brazilian Carnival" and used prevalent symbols such as soccer and samba dancers to communicate the idea.
Once we have decided the theme, we worked with the treasurer to apply for funds. Around the same time, we looked for different performers and caterers. We negotiated with different performers and had them make adjustments to fit in the purpose of our event. Later, we gathered the information together and decided the best performing group together in the Gala committee. There were lots of group decisions involved during the planning process.
Gala food
One of the challenges we encountered was a limited budget for food. To reduce the cost of food, we recruited volunteers to work with Chef Renata Bocayuva. We scheduled meetings with the chef and designed a schedule that worked for most volunteers and the chef. Since the food preparation was on weekdays and people also needed a food permit to volunteer, it was not easy to recruit volunteers. Another challenge was to consider the traffic and scheduling of cars when we were sending off volunteers to the kitchen. I worked with staff and my committee members, gathered information of each others' availability and reached out to other communities such as the Brazilian Club. In the end, we catered over two hundred people with authentic Brazilian food such as empadinhas, pao de queijo and guarana.
FIUTS student board members, facilitators, and friends at Global Gala. Photos by Juliet Le Huang
When it was one month away from Gala, we started to work on decorations and to schedule detailed shifts. This process also had lots of teamwork involved. When we were deciding decorations, team members posted their suggestions on the Facebook page and then made long discussions after the post. When scheduling detailed volunteer shifts, we considered the availability of each volunteer, the operation time of campus resources and the logistics. We created a very detailed volunteer shifts based on all the information the whole committee gathered.
Overall, it was all teamwork. As our team got to know each other better, we generated more creative ideas along the way and truly enjoyed the planning process.
Congratulations to Xinglu, fellow co-chair Michel Riquelme Sanderson, and the other members of the FIUTS Student Board for planning a fantastic Global Gala!