In 2019, while still in the eleventh standard, I joined Zero Gravity, the volunteer wing of the Dr. Shrikant Jichkar Foundation, as an F&B Associate in event planning. I had no formal training in events or fundraising. What I had was proximity to a cause and a willingness to be useful. That combination turned into an eight-year, ongoing relationship with the organisation, one that has quietly shaped how I think about communication, coordination, and brand work today.
This is not a case study about a campaign. It is a case study about what eight years of unpaid, high-stakes, real-world work can teach a person that a classroom cannot.
My first assignment was food and beverage coordination for the Old Age Home Fundraiser, Zero Gravity's flagship event. F&B sounds administrative until you are the one responsible for it live, at a fundraiser, with donors watching and elderly residents depending on the event running smoothly. There is no room for a second attempt. You learn to plan for failure points before they happen, because the cost of not doing so is immediate and visible.
From there, I moved into the Happy School Project and then into the first year of Project Happiness, Zero Gravity's larger annual initiative. Each project added a new layer of responsibility. I was no longer just executing a task. I was starting to understand why the task existed and how it connected to the larger fundraising goal.
A specific moment changed how I saw this work. Zero Gravity ran in-house stalls at multiple events to sell merchandise and raise funds directly from attendees. Standing at those stalls, I saw firsthand that a good cause does not sell itself. The stalls that did well were the ones where the pitch was clear, the story was told well, and the ask was specific. The ones that did not do well had the same merchandise and the same cause, but weaker communication.
That was the first time I understood, practically rather than academically, that marketing communication is not decoration on top of a good cause. It is the mechanism that converts a good cause into actual funds. This realisation shaped every role I took on afterwards.
During COVID, my role shifted into something far more consequential. I worked as an assistant coordinating bed allowances, tracking real-time updates on bed and room vacancies across hospitals during a period when that information was, quite literally, the difference between a family finding care and not finding it in time.
There was no template for this. Information changed by the hour, sources were inconsistent, and the people on the other end of every call were frightened. This period taught me that communication under pressure has to be fast, accurate, and calm, in that order. It is the closest I have come to understanding what it means for communication to carry real stakes rather than brand stakes, and that distinction has stayed with me in every strategy conversation since.
As the relationship with Zero Gravity matured, so did my role. I moved into PR and event management for in-house brands and for external brands participating in Project Happiness and other initiatives. Eventually, I was named coordinator for both the participating brands and the volunteer teams working alongside them, a role that required managing two very different sets of expectations at once: brand partners who needed visibility and return on their participation, and volunteers who needed clarity and direction to do their jobs well.
This is where the earlier years compounded. The logistics discipline from the F&B days, the persuasion instinct from the merchandise stalls, and the composure built during COVID all came together in a role that was, functionally, brand and stakeholder management.
Eight years at Zero Gravity did not give me a title. It gave me a working education in how communication actually behaves when money, urgency, and real human need are all on the table at once. I did not learn marketing communication from a case study. I learned it by standing at a merchandise stall watching a pitch succeed or fail in real time, and by coordinating hospital bed updates during a public health crisis where clarity was not optional.
That is the foundation I bring into brand strategy work today: an instinct for communication that has been tested where it actually matters, not just where it is convenient to practice it.