By Connor Chen, FCSN Volunteer

2020 has truly been a rollercoaster of emotions. Due to having to quarantine during COVID-19, many of us have not seen some of our friends and family since early March. And although the year has been difficult, causing us to experience emotions such as boredom or sadness, we have explored numerous solutions for keeping in touch with our close friends. One solution that I came up with was virtual birthday parties, which I thought would be a fantastic way for the FCSN members to interact with their friends and family and have some fun through a wide variety of activities. So far, our parties have included both stationary activities as well as fun moving activities to stay active! These include Simon Says, Freeze Dance, Bingo, Pictionary, and many more. Typically, we received around thirty participants per party, all of whom enjoyed the events very much.

Preparation for the parties took a lot of work though! It included an introductory meeting, dry runs to get a feel of the party, and hundreds of emails being sent back and forth between the volunteers and organizers. Additionally, for each party, we tried our best to come up with new activities for the participants. These new activities often took a long time to think of and required creative thinking. For example, my team created a virtual scavenger hunt, which was a convenient alternative to a traditional in-person scavenger hunt. In addition to planning these activities, we had to design survey forms and polls for the FCSN members attending the parties. Through these polls, we learned the participants’ preferred party dates and favorite activities so we could tailor the parties to their preferences. In addition, my team set up a website, which contained information about the parties as well numerous games and stories for the members to enjoy. Although this was not an easy task, my team truly enjoyed carrying out this project and had tons of fun interacting with the FCSN members! This has been an extremely memorable experience, and I would like to thank my team for making this project so successful through their hard work. I would also like to thank FCSN for this opportunity which has been the experience of a lifetime. Finally, I would like to thank all of the FCSN participants for attending these events, as without you, none of this would have been possible.