From inside IlmSummit 2008 – Part I

asSalamu Alaykom,

I was the on site coordinator of IlmSummit for the year 2008 and boy was it an experience. In June of 2008 I was contacted by Head Quarters and was asked to coordinate this event. First thought was heck YEAA… then after i agreed I was like .. holly!!! …. I have to take care of 150 students for 17 straight days… what did i get my self in to…. anyway… so here is how I and my crew did it in preparation of IlmSummit..

1- Since over 98% of the students weren’t from Houston, that meant that they are either flying in or driving so we started an online form (on almaghrib site) and asked all those who are coming to fill it it.
In this form, we asked questions like name, contact info, in case of EMS, flight details…etc

2- Got in contact with my boss, Sh. Yasir Qadhi, who gave me some more tasks to do such as preparing the banquette (which has a long story i will mention later) as well as some logistics that dealt with the hotel and the program.

3- Contacted the hotel and set up a few meetings with them so that all of us were on the same page. About a week and a half before IlmSummit, I sat down with the lady manager there to confirm the ballrooms and found out that there will be a Baptist convention running parallel to us for the first weekend. Not only that but they took all the big ballrooms so we stuck with a smaller room to fit 150 people which we eventually did.

4- Contacted a few Hosna core volunteers and assigned roles to them. Some of them were responsible for the shuttling people from and to the airport, others were responsible for the food, others where there on site with me to help me with servicing the students of knowledge.

5- Created a schedule for the food, so for example, the first day lunch was from Busyboy (american subs) and dinner was from Eastern Grill (desi food), second day lunch was Jerusalem (arab food) and dinner was from Halal Wok (chinese food)…etc

6- Contacted 5 food vendors and made a agreed on the prices, the form of payment, and the delivery.
Note: Not all of them delivered which was problematic for me and my crew.

7- Contacted the Van Rental Company and made a deal with them to rent two vans for the weekend

8- Contacted one of our sisters who does some graphic work for Hosna and asked her for a logo for IlmSummit (there was one already in place which I didnt like so I just decided to change lol) and sure enough i had like 10 to choose from mashaAllah and I picked that one that I liked and showed it to Shaykh Yasir and he was cool with it.

9- Created a welcome packet that included things like the following: Welcome to IlmSummit by Yasir Qadhi, Welcome to Houston by me, the qiblah, the food schedule, near by pharmacies, police stations, etc.

10- Gathered all the arrival information and added them to an excel sheet then sent individual emails to the students asking them to verify their information, which they did. That day I received over 150 emails either confirming or correcting the information that I sent. Which was mistake because it was too hard for me to go to each email individually and check it with the excel sheet that I had already. This could have been avoidable if I had a data base.

11- After confirming the arrival information, I emailed it and printed out to the two driver volunteers. They mashaAllah did and awesome job dividing the load in between themselves. We had two airports (Hobby Airport, and Inter-Continental Airport) both are about 22 miles away from the hotel (one to the north and the other to the Southeast).

12- Send two of the volunteers to Sams (which was closed lol so they went to Walmart) to buy 4000 chips and 4000 drinks (sodas and water) which ended up not being enough (believe it or not). So they rented a Uhaul and brought the stuff in it. They brought it in on the first day and loaded in my hotel room/storage room/filming room/party room (i will get in to that in later)

13- Created a wish list for IlmSummit students on the forums and asked the students to wish for whatever they want. Here is the link: http://forums.almaghrib.org/showthread.php?t=27736
Over 5000 views and 160 posts, some of which were realistic and helpful and some where just striaght up outta of the box… but alhamdulilah I think we were able to satisfy most of the wishes of our students walhamdulillah.

This was an over view of what I did in preparation of IlmSummt. Of course there was a lot of behind the scenes stuff going on … but i dont want to bore you with the details… It might seems simple but it really isn’t given the time frame that we were working with and the fact that we had The Sacred Scrolls 2 weeks before IlmSummit. All the volunteers were just exhausted.

For Part II, I will talk about some challenges that we came across and how they were overcame them.
For Part III , I will talk about some of the memorable moments of IlmSummit and the Laundry story
For Part IV (last part inshaAllah), IlmSummit 2009 where to set the expectations.
Finally, some never been seen before pictures that I took of the final banquette and the exams.