Camosun College Marketing students have adapted to the COVID-19 pandemic and taken their fundraising efforts online. Students in Marketing 420 (Marketing Project Management) recently raised through a silent online auction $18,400 in support of youth education and development in Zambia.
The money went to Victoria-based international development organization VIDEA, and it allows students in Zambia to attend the Rural Youth Exposure conference in Lusaka, Zambia, where they’re able to network and gain access to opportunities that could further their education. (VIDEA partnered with Zambia-based Women For Change, an organization that supports education for women, for this initiative.) Coming from the place many Camosun students do, it can be hard to understand just how life-changing an opportunity like this can be for students in Zambia, says Camosun marketing instructor Anne Borrowman.
“We are privileged to start with,” says Borrowman. “I feel that through that privilege, we really are making a huge impact in ways that we don’t even know immediately. Over the seven years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen huge impacts for not just one or two people, probably 50 people, easily.”
Borrowman stays in touch with the organizations she works with to see the outcomes of the donations come into play. After their education, the students will sometimes be agents of change in their Zambian communities.
“They are very marginalized,” says Borrowman, who has spent time in Zambia. “Zambia’s an amazing country. The people there are very resourceful, and it’s a very safe country; there’s not a lot of political strife there compared to some others. It’s really about being able to give [the students] the tools to be able to develop what they need to develop, and that’s what we’re doing.”
The students raised money through the aforementioned online auction, as well as at bottle drives and other in-person events before the COVID-19 pandemic brought in social-distancing protocols. When the world had to adjust quickly, so did the 38 students in the class. Borrowman says the scenario was a prime example of how important agility is in project management.
“For the whole class, it was a demonstration in resilience,” she says. “Three quarters of them are graduating this term. I know the stress level went pretty high.”
That didn’t stop the students from raising a few thousand dollars more than any Camosun Marketing 420 class has ever raised. But for Borrowman, it’s not really about the money.
“It’s a marker to the success, to some degree, when you’re talking fundraising,” she says. “But the other side of it [is] I’ve marked all the reports and looked at the process, and what they went through. It was an outstanding year for reporting on things and the closure. I have to say, this group was pretty amazing.”