Yesterday I had my maiden voyage as a volunteer location leader for Starlight Day.

I only hope that the volunteers at my location enjoyed the experience as much as I did. I couldn’t have asked for a better group of people!

When I first signed up as a location leader I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into. It wasn’t until last week that I realised that this gig involved quite a bit of organisation.

Some of my responsibilities:
- Call all the volunteers beforehand to confirm if they were still attending,
- Manage cancellations (one on the day and only because I called the person to ask them where they were)
- Contact the Parramatta Council to understand what the location permit actually allowed us
- Manage additions (I also had to decline a request from one of the volunteers to add an extra four more people as we had already reached our limit for the shift, as confirmed with Starlight)
- I had eight boxes couriered to me sitting on my living room floor for four days leading up to the event
- Arrange tables,  chairs and parking with the caretaker of the town hall yesterday morning before the volunteers started to arrive
- Provide support to, and motivate, the volunteers (they were a pretty happy bunch so I really didn’t need to do much in this department).
- Ensure safety for the volunteers at all times
- After the event I had to count all the merchandise left as well as the money collected to determine how much we actually sold
- Tomorrow I’ll need to arrange the courier to come and pick up the remaining merchandise. I also need to visit ANZ bank to deposit the money that was collected.

Now despite all that I didn’t find it all too difficult at all, as I consciously made an effort to do what needed to be done and to enjoy doing it at the same time.

Considering that most of my team didn’t have any prior retail or sales experience, and most of them were high school students, I didn’t expect us to sell all six boxes of merchandise that the Starlight Foundation provided us with. We managed to sell $456.00 worth of product and also received $80.25 in donations - a total of $536.25. Now that’s pretty darn good!

I was quite interested in observing the types of people that either purchased an item or donated, as well as those that were rude or just too busy in their own heads to really stop and care. I think some of the volunteers found the latter group of people disheartening at times. I mean here we are trying to do some good in the world, and a great deal of people just walked on by or when they were approached either executed the sidestep manoeuvre or had a look of contempt on their faces. I wondered if I had ever made that face at volunteers or people asking for help before - consciously or unconsciously.

Thankfully there were also moments where a shining ray of light would come through, like when a gentleman walked up to our table, dropped ten dollars into the donation cup, and walked away. This was an example of what humanity is all about. That one selfless action made us all smile. It gave us hope and inspiration.

The day was also a good day to challenge some limiting beliefs. Six months ago I would have trembled in my boots at the thought of walking up and down Church St Mall with a cup in hand asking people for donations. Yesterday was a different story - well for me it was. One time I asked Toro to walk with me, and I did it because of an earlier comment that he’d made about how people were less likely to donate if they saw two guys walking around together collecting money. I was determined to test this theory.

I believed that the key to getting donations was how you approached people (you don’t want to come across as a "used cars salesperson" or a dodgy character), and selling them the benefits of the charity ie. how they were contributing to help a good cause. If there’s one thing that I’ve learnt over the past few weeks it’s that you need to throw out all judgments of people based on the visual (first impression) level, and really talk to them to understand what’s going on underneath.

The exercise was great, and we did pretty well even though we weren’t sporting yellow Starlight shirts and we were both guys. I felt like I was on MythBusters or something!.

So overall it was a fantastic day and I left at day’s end on a natural high. I had met such great and loving people, I had a really engaging discussion with Toz about life, and most importantly I had been of service.

I’m looking forward to the next experience :)

If you’d like to contribute to the Starlight Foundation either by donating or purchasing something from their online shop, check out www.starlight.org.au