At times when students get burnt out and fall behind in motivation, they often need a little bit of inspiration or an incentive to get them back on track in serving the community. The push is often derived from Etijah’s coordinators but it is also possible to see an occasion when individuals from within the student body re-energize their colleagues.
A shining example of this is Omnia Elorany, a student from cohort 4 at Alexandria University. Omnia has always been an active participant in community service as she has served the community with 44 hours this quarter alone. When COVID-19 shook the student body and decreased some of their motivation to work, Omnia went into action and made her leadership skills shine bright to bring back the spirit to work when it was most needed by the Egyptian society.
Omnia communicated with her colleagues from the cohort and motivated so many of them to begin a COVID-19 online awareness campaign fueled by her and her colleagues’ renewed ambition and sense of responsibility. In a few weeks, Omnia and her colleagues were capable of finalizing the preparations necessary for starting the campaign and identifying their target group as well as instruments they will use to reach them most efficiently. Importantly, the leadership skills that Omnia brought into the group have also inspired many previously uninspired students which increased the overall community service hours done by the cohort. Omnia commented saying that she was “glad that the cohort was united to achieve a single goal that would benefit the community”.
Omnia and other similar individuals are at the core of what any community service-related project needs to be sustainable and impactful especially at times when the average community member would lose spirit. Thankfully, community service activities and projects are what allow such potential leaders to come to the social theater to discover themselves and their abilities to truly be the influencers that they can be.