Red Cross Blogs

Takeover day at the Red Cross

By Guest
November 26, 2010 at 2:29 pm

Lizzie Laessing (25) is a home from hospital volunteer in Bristol who was recruited to take part in the Red Cross’ Takeover Day Event. Takeover Day is an initiative masterminded by The Children’s Commissioner to give young people across the country the chance to work alongside adults and get involved in decision-making.

Friday 12th November saw 13 young Red Cross volunteers taking over the roles of the senior management team at the head office in London – a hijack of the SMT meeting that normally happens once a month. It was a great chance to really get to grips with how the organisation is run and provide some feedback and ideas directly to the top! I had been given the role of our CEO, Sir Nick Young – slightly daunting, but I was looking forward to the challenge.

We met the day before with someone from human resources who gave us some invaluable tips on problem solving, presentation skills and, particularly for me as CEO, how to run a successful meeting.

Despite having never met each other before, the board members worked well together constructing towers of spaghetti and figuring out the best strategy to survive an emergency crash landing in the Antarctic with not much prospect of survival! Thankfully we had some experts in the group who were able to identify some of the pitfalls of our equipment…Having survived the crash we could see how we each contributed to the decision making process, and how we could work together during the meeting the following day.

After a nice meal and a not-so-peaceful night’s sleep – our accommodation was right next to St. Paul’s Cathedral, did you know the bells ring every 15 minutes? – we put on our senior management hats and headed for a day of hard work in the board room.

We had some really interesting presentations: a sneak preview of some marketing ideas for Red Cross Appeal Week in May 2011- our annual major fundraising drive (it’s going to be a good one, so get involved!); insight into recovery operations in Haiti (the largest single country deployment in Red Cross history!) and how the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies works with other agencies in these kind of situations; the role of young people in delivering our strategy; the Red100 conference for young volunteers and ways of obtaining the views of young people more easily. Probably our most interesting discussion was about how to make the Red Cross truly inclusive to all ages.

I had no idea how tiring chairing a meeting can be. Ensuring that everybody’s opinion has been sought and understood clearly is much harder than I thought it would be. Not much time to lose concentration or let your mind wander with thoughts on the information you’ve been presented with!

So thank you, British Red Cross and Sir Nick – I hope we’ve left the place intact!

---

Comment (0) »

---

Tags: takeover day

The Red Cross values comments both complimentary and critical. However, we will not tolerate the following: aggressive or personal criticism of the blogger, breach of copyright, obscene, defamatory, profane, sexually oriented, racially offensive or likewise objectionable comments.

This entry was posted on Friday, November 26th, 2010 at 2:29 pm and is filed under Young volunteers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

---