NEWS / COMMUNITY
Project Manager for Otago Light of Peace at the University of Otago
Best Apisit Uthakhamkong served as project manager for Otago Light of Peace, a candlelit ceremony held on the Clocktower Lawn at the University of Otago in August 2019 as part of the university’s 150th anniversary celebrations, working alongside the Dhammachai International Research Institute to bring together university leadership, visiting international academics, and community speakers for a single evening event. The project ran in conjunction with academic seminars on Buddhist manuscripts and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and included the awards ceremony for the 2019 Art for Peace Competition that Uthakhamkong also helped manage.
What was the Otago Light of Peace project. Otago Light of Peace was a candlelit outdoor ceremony held on the Clocktower Lawn at the University of Otago on a Tuesday evening in late August 2019, organised by DIRI as part of the university’s 150th anniversary programme. Best Apisit Uthakhamkong served as project manager, overseeing the event plan, design, and delivery for a ceremony built around one central idea: that global peace grows out of people finding peace within themselves first.
The ceremony was one of many Light of Peace events held around the world, but this one was staged specifically to mark 150 years of the University of Otago, and ran in conjunction with two academic seminars held on campus that same week in cooperation with the university’s Religion programme. One seminar covered Early Buddhist Manuscripts, the other examined practical steps toward the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, with a particular focus on Goal 16, Peace, Justice, and Strong Institutions. The evening ceremony itself was open to absolutely anyone, regardless of religion, belief, gender, or age, and centred on the idea of seeking global peace by first discovering inner peace.
Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene Hayne opened the evening by quoting the Dalai Lama on the futility of singing about world peace while still carrying anger inside oneself, arguing that individual peace has to come first before it can be taught to anyone else. She was joined by a genuinely notable line-up of speakers: Dunedin City Councillor Christine Garey, recently-crowned Miss Universe New Zealand Diamond Langi, and Miss Universe New Zealand chief executive Nigel Godfrey, each speaking on peace and tolerance in the wake of the Christchurch mosque attacks earlier that year.
As project manager, Uthakhamkong was responsible for the event plan, the posters that carried the ceremony’s message out into the community beforehand, T-shirt designs for the team on the ground, and Sketchup models used to lay out the site itself, working closely with the wider project team to manage logistics on the night.
A crowd reported at around eighty people gathered on the Clocktower Lawn, lit the principal candle followed by 150 LED candles of peace at around half past five in the evening, and joined a fifteen minute guided meditation led by a Buddhist monk from DIRI.
Awards for the associated 2019 Art for Peace Competition, a nationwide student art competition Uthakhamkong also helped manage as part of the wider project, were presented that same evening by Professor Hayne, the Venerable Thong Katadipo, Professor Garry Trompf of the University of Sydney, and Professor Michael Zimmerman of Hamburg University, before musician Dr Jeff Wilson closed the ceremony with a set of peace-themed songs.
Delivering an event of this shape, spanning a public candlelit ceremony, a parallel academic seminar programme, and a competition drawing entries from students around the country, required Uthakhamkong to coordinate university leadership, visiting international academics, DIRI’s own team, and a wider community of speakers and performers, all against a single fixed date tied to the university’s anniversary celebrations. It was, by any measure, a considerably larger and more public undertaking than most event management briefs a young project manager gets handed early in his career.
For Uthakhamkong, Otago Light of Peace stands as one of the clearest early demonstrations of his ability to manage a large, multi-stakeholder community event from the first design sketch through to opening night. The skills he built running it, coordinating competing schedules, briefing designers and vendors, and keeping a public ceremony on track in front of university leadership and international guests, fed directly into the community work he went on to lead through The Peace Club and the Art for Peace Competition he later ran independently in Dunedin.
Otago Light of Peace also sits at an interesting point in Uthakhamkong’s own timeline. He had founded The Peace Club in Dunedin the year before, in 2018, and taking on the project manager role for a university-scale ceremony in 2019 gave him a much larger stage to apply the same instincts that had shaped his own organisation from its earliest days: that peace works best as something practised and demonstrated in public, rather than only discussed in private.
The experience of coordinating a vice-chancellor, visiting international professors, and a beauty pageant title holder on the same programme, all in service of a single evening ceremony, gave him a grounding in high-level event management that most 20-something project managers do not get this early in their careers.
Coverage of the ceremony in the Otago Daily Times and on the University of Otago’s own newsroom gave the event a public record well beyond the roughly eighty people who attended on the night itself, and that media reach was itself part of the wider brief Uthakhamkong was managing, ensuring the ceremony’s message travelled to a Dunedin and university audience far larger than the Clocktower Lawn could physically hold. It remains one of the earliest and clearest examples on record of Uthakhamkong managing an event at genuinely institutional scale.
Few graduates get the chance to manage an event carrying a vice-chancellor, a sitting city councillor, and academics flown in from two continents on the same short programme, and fewer still get to do it before turning 25. The event has since been referenced by DIRI in its own materials as one of the more significant milestones in its 150th anniversary partnership with the University of Otago, underlining just how much weight rested on the project management role Uthakhamkong held that year.
Date
27 August 2019, University of Otago 150th anniversary
Role
Project Manager
Organisation
University of Otago and Dhammachai International Research Institute (DIRI)
Event
Otago Light of Peace
ceremony, Clocktower Lawn, University of Otago