Good morning! My name is Alex, and today I’ll be talking about starting a high school club. Clubs are a big part of the extracurricular activities offered at school, and joining them can be a great way to connect with others who share similar interests. However, what happens if there isn’t one that interests you? Well, the answer is simple: start your own. Today, I’ll talk about the general process of setting up your own club, as well as what to do and what not to do.
First, make sure that you’re actually passionate about the club that you’re starting. If you aren’t, it’s likely that you’ll end up running out of motivation. Starting a club that you’re not passionate about doesn’t just waste your time; it wastes your advisor’s time and your board members’ time as well. Also, make sure that your club actually contributes something to your school environment and isn’t just a filler club that you fill with useless board positions in order to put on a college application. Having a club that creates impact will look better on an application anyway, and creating a filler club is just a waste of time and effort. If you satisfy both of these criteria, we can move on to the next step, which is actually starting the club.
If you’re starting a club, you probably want to gather people who are interested in the same topic as you are. After that, you typically want to find an advisor in order to supervise your club. An advisor doesn’t necessarily have to play a large role in your club. Because of this, it’s okay to seek out an advisor who doesn’t teach the same subject that you’re planning to center your club around. Your advisor should be someone that you’re comfortable working with, as you’ll probably have to work in tandem in order to register your club. Club registration varies from school to school, but there are usually forms that you have to fill out that express what the goal of your club is as well as other information regarding how your club will be run, such as how leadership positions will be selected and how you’ll raise money for your club if necessary. After you’ve finished all of these steps, congrats! Your club is now an official thing at your school. Now you actually have to find members in order to fill your club.
After starting a club, you’ll want to advertise a ton. Set up a date in advance for an intro/interest meeting, and do anything you can to spread the word. If you have morning announcements, put in a message there. Start a media page, tell all of your friends about the club, and encourage them to join. Create posters and put them up around the school, and even consider buying food to make people show up to your first meeting. During the first meeting, have everyone write down their names and email on a sign-in sheet in order to get an email list to stay in contact. After everything is done, you’ll (hopefully) be left with a roster of members to keep in touch with.
You want to actively engage your members. To do so, schedule frequent and consistent meetings, and prepare activities for all of them. Have games and fun activities for everyone. You should also consider having peers take up leadership positions in order to take some of the burden off your shoulders. If you manage funds, get a treasurer. You can get a media manager to continue to spread the word of the club out to others, and a vice-president as well to manage smaller issues. However, you should make sure that you’re not creating useless board positions. In many cases, if you’re running a small club, having a secretary or a vice president isn’t necessary at all. If you aren’t actively managing funds, you won’t need a treasurer either. On the same branch, you can create new club-specific leadership positions. If your club works on projects, you can assign students to become project leads. In the end, it’s up to you to figure out who’s best fit for the position and who you can work with the best.
That’s it for today! Creating a club is a great way to express interest in a topic and create an environment for like-minded people. If you’re truly passionate about what you’re doing, you won’t have any trouble starting a club at your school.