When I first heard about our chance to present an idea to improve Kitchener to councillors at City Hall, my first thought was “I hope we get to pick our own groups!” and fortunately enough, we did! With some of my closest friends in the class; Ethan, Reid, Megan, Aly, and Jasmine, I knew we would generate many ideas that could improve Kitchener.
My group got to work right away, and after the first class we had over 5 different ideas! Once we started to explore Kitchener’s future plans we realized that some of our ideas were already being implemented. Finally, we agreed on an idea that would help future students with the new LRT. We had decided that all students with a 80% average and 40 volunteer hours would get up to 5 days a week of free transit. But, after contacting schools across the board to check for averages, we had realized that there was way too many students with 80% averages. We had to modify it to 90% to make it more reasonable. Also, when Bil Ioannidis, a councillor, came to see how our class was doing with the projects, he told us that we should modify the volunteer hours to 55, since we should try to get students to achieve more than the required amounts of volunteer hours. Therefore, our final project and idea was to allow students with a 90% average in school and 55 volunteer hours, up to 5 days a week free transit on the new LRT. My group was very excited about this and we started a slideshow and script right away. By the time our day to present at City Hall had come, we were more than ready to present! Our group had planned to wear coordinated outfits. The girls wore black dresses and jean jackets, and the boys wore blue dress shirts, ties, and dress pants. In my opinion, we looked pretty spiffy. Our group was the first to present and with all the excitement and a little bit of nervousness, it went really well and we definitely set a high expectation for other groups. We were prepared and presented our ideas clearly with a really good and easy to read slideshow! When all groups had finished, I can confidently say that ours was the best. Overall, this project was very fun! I liked working with my friends on a challenging yet interesting project, with the freedom to choose any topic we wanted. I learned many things such as, I prefer working in groups than alone because it takes stress off, that Kitchener has many ideas in place to make the city great, and lastly that the city councillors are very relaxed, nice and not scary or intimidating at all.