110 change-makers hosted the First Khmer Literature and Culture festival at the Liger Leadership Academy — The biggest event yet for the academy.
We spent more than two months in the Khmer essential class to organize the entire event.
The hard work and the inspiration from all the students is an exemplary demonstration of how much preserving and promoting literature, history, tradition, and cultures to other high school peers mean to us.
To put together a successful event with over 400 participants from five different public and government high schools, there was a lot of hard work, creativity, and responsibility from everyone.
I started as the planning committee to help structure the plan for the event. I have the leadership and the vision to ignite the motivation, momentum, and mission for the team to begin. I was contented that my skills were a valuable asset to the team; I also knew that there were people who are better at designing interactive booths, organizing advanced logistics, and communicating with hundreds of participants. According to Phil Jackson, “The strength of the team is each individual member. The strength of each member is the team.” This shows that it is more efficient and effective to organize a successful event if everyone’s focus on their specializations and trust the team expertise on other tasks.
Not all things go as planned, therefore in the middle of planning, the team had faced some challenges: not enough educational booths and shortage in funds. Since the end goal was too precious to give up, no matter how challenging the problems and how busy I was, I assist the team by leading a brainstorming session, finding two new sponsors, and lead two teams to organize two competitions: debate and public speaking while my teammates continued to work tirelessly on their different parts of the project.
As a result, there were more 12 booths that share insights into our culture, literature, tradition, practice, and religion. Those booths range from illegal fishing, Human of Cambodia, Traditional instrument and music to debate, traditional costume from each era, and guest speaker.
The festival offers the opportunity for the Liger and other institutions to exchange each other knowledge and practice networking, communicating, and collaborating skills.
Lastly, this success of the festival is almost impossible if there were not wide collaboration, concentration, and consensus from everyone.