I got an email saying that I had been selected to serve on a committee, and that the first meeting would be in one week.  During the initial meeting we divided into groups and appointed team leaders.  I was selected as the leader to develop a plan for implementation to give away shoes.  The reason that we chose to do a shoe give away project was that one of the committee members had been contacted by a local charitable organization about surplus shoes from an international charity group that they wanted to donate.  Consequently, we thought that it was our good fortune and happily accepted their offer; so, as you can deduce it fell into our laps – easy, right. A follow-up meeting was set for the following week for committee member to report on their progress.

My next step was to work on a written plan to have for the next meeting with the Finance members to set a budget and schedule additional planning meetings. I emailed the plan to my team/sub-committee to get their input. They responded positively and we discussed the plan at the following meeting. We worked out a system to verify criteria and decided to give voucher forms to each individual who was to be given a pair of shoes. This would help us to maintain a record with the addition of sign-in sheets. The publicity team made flyer and distributed them and took care of other means to get the word out. Alright, we had a plan – super, but a plan is nothing until it is put into action.

The event was scheduled to happen within two weeks; so, we scheduled team shoe pick-up for four days prior to the event. Since the shoes were picked up in advance it gave us time to inspect and organize them which was around the time that someone mentioned that the shoes would not be appropriate for the school aged children which was our target group. We called a meeting to decide what to do about it, and then a decision was made to provide us a budget to shop for shoes which met the criteria set by the school officials. We divided into shopping teams to purchase the shoes. Each team was given a list of the type of shoes and sizes that we needed. We decided to make use of the donated shoes by opening up to adults and allow individuals to pick-out shoes for someone who needed them.

When the event days came and went, we still had a lot of inventory left over so our head project leader instructed us to deliver the remaining shoes to various locations.   We made arrangements with the selected management offices and scheduled times to give away shoes on the next business day.  We kept the voucher, verification, and sign-in systems that we had previously used.  We organized into teams to go the certain sites, and each team had two sites.  We were successful with giving away the inventory, but we learned a valuable and well paid for lesson about taking so called easy projects.  Therefore, we decided that the future would not involve giving away shoes.

Now, share your experience with implementing a plan to accomplish a mission in the comment space below.  For example, I previously shared this story with my Toastmasters club to complete Level 3 in Pathways, and to write this post, I put some Rick James on and got it done. Happy speaking everyone!