Venues
One of the most important parts aspected of throwing a YN Party is selecting an appropriate venue for the event. I'd like to use this topic to discuss the best possible venues for hosting a Yuri's Night, the pros and cons of each option, and how to decide which is right for you and the crowd you are expecting.
//Clubs
//Apartment Complexes
//Houses/House Party
//City Squares
//Amusement Parks
//Student Unions/On-Campus
Any other good venues?
Advantages:
Most club owners are happy to accomodate special parties, as long as they don't interfere with regular business on club nights. If you agree to do all the promoting for the event and do a few other special things, the club owner has absolutely nothing to lose by letting you have a large group of people pay regular price to get in. Drinks are available for anyone who is old enough, so the responsibility of controlling underage drinking is on the house, not you. Music is already included, and adding special music to the playlist is no problem at all. If you've already done enough for the club owner, getting someone on the microphone for some announcements, contests, etc. will be no problem. Sound system is already included as well.
Disadvantages:
If you want to throw an exclusive party with a set guest list, it might cost a lot. You may have to do this for crowd control if you don't want a lot of regular clubbers interfering with your party (although why wouldn't you? They obviously know how to party and they represent the people Yuri's Night is trying to reach out to). All clubs have a maximum capacity, unlike a house or a city block party, so you may accidentally turn away your VIP guests if it's already full.
Personally, I haven't dealt with clubs at all. These are just my speculations from what I've seen once when a friend hosted his birthday party at a club.
An unprecedented approach was taken to the hosting of Yuri's Night 2007, organized by the IHY-Nigeria Education and Public Outreach, EPO unit in Lagos, Nigeria.
Firstly, considering the low level of awareness of space by the populace, it will be really unjustifiable to throw a party, or rather publicize a party of such magnitude without associating it with other benefits. So, I had thought we should take a two-edged approach: still organize a party but with a lot of educational content; and do it with the students, in their schools, in their classrooms and during the day. It was really cool.
The other reason why that approach was taken has to do with the fact that, securing sponsorship was herculean, so I had to make do with my personal fund, and as well limit it to what I can contain.
And thirdly, I considered high school students because we need to catch them young for space endeavor. It worked, the students are now singing SPACE in their schools and developing their mathematics and sciences skills. This is really positive.
As a developing nation, the conventional Yuri's Night party approach of using clubs, city squares, etc, may be that we are not properly adapting the processes of Yuri's Night to our environment, hence, the novel approach, and it worked just fine. The success was resounding. An article on this hit one of the major newspapers editorial page.
However, we earmarked three schools but because of logistics issues, we could only do one within the Lagos metropolis on 12 April, and others in other states were deferred. The IHY-Nigeria EPO unit, went ahead to mark another of such yesterday, 15th May, 2007, fully educational.
With this level of awareness, I believe subsequent Yuri's Night can come in the conventional form in Nigeria, since people have an appreciable amount of knowledge about Yuri's Night now, otherwise, the public would have thought of us as juvenile delinquent (shooting ourself in the foot!) - so we have successfully broken that barrier for future events.
So, I believe some other developing countries can take a cue from this our approach. And if you have any questions, do not hesitate to revert to me.
Ad Astra,
Ayodele Faiyetole, MSS
IHY-Nigeria EPO, National Coordinator
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Joined: 2007-01-16