ISLAH FOUNDATION- By Amal Avengers

PHASE 2

Hey y’all. Hope you guys are doing good. I am back with another blog on Islah Foundation. I left y’all on a cliffhanger the last time, didn’t I? :P

You can go read the first one here, if you haven’t already.

So let’s begin!

PROGRESS

The main events that took place in the past 10 days since the last blog are:

1- We conducted our 4th webinar on the topic social anxiety. We chose this topic because lockdown restrictions are just being lifted and socializing after such a long time can be overwhelming for some people.

We hit a milestone with this webinar and got 104 registrations.

About 30 people attended the webinar and we had a really impactful discussion.

2- Second major progress that we made is that we started publishing written blogs on the official Islah foundation medium account. We published two blogs just last week and so far we have 22 views.

CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS

We faced one major challenge while conducting our 4th Webinar. Get some popcorn because this story is definitely a thriller:

So, we were supposed to have a webinar on Monday at 9PM. And around 3PM we got a text from a random person on our Islah Foundation WhatsApp. This person claimed that the speaker we have on board for the webinar, has put forward fake credentials and we should have verified before announcing registrations. This person said that they work at the same institute that the speaker has claimed to be working in.

I told this person thank you for informing us, in order to end the conversation. After that I discussed the issue with my team members. We all got freaked out a bit, and decided to investigate this further. We decided that we will call-off the webinar if the problem is not resolved because the credibility of Islah Foundation is the number 1 priority for all. After having this nerve wrecking conversation with the team, I reached out to some medical students and they verified that our Speaker has given 100% accurate information. Hence, fortunately we did not have to cancel the event.

This experience, however, did teach us that we should always verify the credentials of our speakers to the best of our extents. The situation definitely was one of the most challenging situations we faced at Islah Foundation, but I am glad that we all were able to handle it well.

CHANGES IN APPROACH

Apart from this, fortunately things have been running smoothly and hence we did not have the need to specifically make any changes to our approach.

IMPACT AND REACH

Following stats show the impact that we have been able to make in the past few weeks, and the number of people we were able to reach out to:

-345 followers and 1300 monthly reach on Facebook

-Reached out to more than 300 people on WhatsApp

-A watch time of almost 5 hours on YouTube in a month

-4 successful webinars and a team of 13 volunteers

-22 views on medium blogs in under a week

And beside all these stats, we have gotten some amazing feedback responses which were a constant source of motivation for all of us:

SUSTAINABILITY AND FUTURE GOALS

We plan on sustaining Islah foundation by taking the following steps:

-We will expand our network by growing our volunteer circles. So far we have not officially made any posts regarding volunteers on any of our social media platforms, and despite that people have reached out to us on their own. This proves that there are so many people who would genuinely love to work with us.

-We plan to collaborate with other similar start-ups (e.g. thelisteners.pk), so we can incorporate one on one sessions as well.

-We are planning to organize an extensive large scale Group-therapy event. (cue to the cliff hanger I left you guys at, in the last blog). This event will start with us making registration forms in which people will be given with 5–6 categories (anxiety, body dysmorphia, depression etc), from among which they can choose two options. These options would represent the mental health problem that they struggle with the most. After that we will email them some questionnaires, that are designed by professionals, to evaluate the seriousness of the mental health issue in a person. The people who get the highest numbers in those questionnaires i.e. those who need the most help, will be chosen for the final event. Because of the limitation of the number of Psychologists we can get on board, we can only choose 50 people at most. On the final event day, these people will be divided into groups of 6–7 people (all dealing with the same category of mental health issue). These groups will be connected to trained therapist who will talk to them and help them figure out their problems.

-Lastly, we plan on introducing short videos by different psychologists for our YouTube channel. Most psychologists we reach out to, are unable to give us 1–1.5 hour from their schedules. But we plan to reach out to the psychologists for 4–6 minute long videos, in which they can briefly explain the coping mechanisms of different mental health issues.

And that brings us to an end to this blog. To know more about Islah Foundation’s journey, and to get regular updates on our blogs, make sure to follow us here.

Take care fellas. ❤