Part of a normal day of BWO involves everyone doing a community service event, which lasts a few hours. Many events are done by one carload of people including 1-2 leaders, some are done by a larger group and sometimes everyone on the base does a large event.
There have been so many different events done over the years. I’ll list these with the most common first.
Backyard blitz: Rarely as fancy as the TV show of that name, we simply do gardening for people who are elderly or otherwise unable to do it themselves.
Nursing homes: We visit an aged care home, join in the activities staff are running and talk with residents.
Cleanup / KESAB: We clear up rubbish in a park or beach area.
Clowning: We dress up as clowns and learn to make balloon animals, then go to a shopping centre and give balloon animals to kids. A favourite event for some people.
Community service orgs: We’ve helped many organisations in a range of ways, sometimes joining in or seeing the hands-on work including with homeless people in the city, sometimes just catching up with a backlog of mainenance or admin.
Schools etc: Go to a school and do whatever they need – painting, gardening, sorting out supplies. Or the same thing at churches or any other place/organsation.
Car wash: We set up in a church carpark and passing motorists pop in for a free car wash. In 2007 we borrowed most of the council-owned car wash mats in Adelaide. A simpler alternative was windscreen washing.
Community event: We run a fun event, with games and perhaps clowns as above, at Elder Park or Tusmore Park. Or join the crowd at a skate park or the Tour Down Under and give out water or sunscreen.
Cooking: Stay at the base and help make dinner for everyone on base or cook biscuits for prisoners.
Awareness: Stay at the base and learn about people in hardship locally or overseas and about the organisations that help them.
Blood donation: This has happened a few times with people aged 16+ who chose this event.
After each event we talk about how we found it. There is often a chance to share experiences with the rest of the base.
Although events take a minority of the time of BWO, they account for a majority of the preparation. Someone needs to contact the relevant organisation and arrange what we’re doing, often a few months earlier. There’s often a lot of emailing or calling back & forth, or visiting to determine the suitablility and size of the tasks or if we need to bring any equipment. Risks are assessed and an event sheet is written up describing things for the leaders who will be going on the day. Sometimes the same event will run over multiple days, but usually with different participants.
Allocating people to events has been a challenge, particularly in some of the early BWOs there were 100+ people going to 15+ events. We needed about the right number at each event, the right number of car seats going to those events (the cars of that event’s leaders holding a full licence, plus any extra driver borrowed for pick-up & drop-off). Beyond those constraints we wanted participants not to go to the same sort of event twice. This scheduling effort took a lot of time before we wrote software to help us do it. Even with that done, there was often a lot of admin work during the week printing out event sheets, lists of who was going where, and making sure the right people got out the door on their way to the right places.
Since 2006 BWO has been held in one of the last two weeks of the summer holidays. January in Adelaide can be very hot. Outdoor events, especially those involving physical work, need to be planned with this in mind. Sometimes events are cancelled and we stack the indoor ones with more people or scramble to arrange others. Sometimes events are called off partway through when the temperature gets too high. Once a whole timeslot was axed and we went swimming instead. Once every day was over 40 and outdoor events for the whole week got knocked out.
Adelaide (except for the hills) is quite dry, particularly in summer, but sometimes rain has caused outdoor events to be cancelled or end early, both in the pre-2006 winter BWOs or sometimes in summer.