A New Tot on the Block - Infant clubs

~Let's take a journey together, and let reality mix with the dream realm~

There you are, sitting in a tree

k-i-s-s-i-n-g

first comes love,

then comes marriage,

then comes your club in a baby carriage!

• Infant clubs - where you're in for stressful days, sleepless nights and loads of responsibilities.

      So if you didn't already get my reference, an infant club is basically a club that has yet to be founded at your school, or has died out for a long time and you are trying to resurrect it.  It's difficult to start a club from the bottom up and build the foundation, and usually a successful club will take years until it is stable- even then it's not always safe. The amount of members and their dedication is dependent on the amount of work and passion that the board puts in that year. You have to at least give 1 percent to even get anything back.
      Honestly there are numerous clubs that are started because someone was passionate about something and genuinely wanted to start it, but there are infant clubs that are created with ill will - usually those that are created as another part on a resume. Starting a new club is a huge responsibility and the responsibilities are similar to that of a child. You can't just have it to have it - nor can you play off your popularity alone. You have to be prepared to handle any situations that come to you, study your stuff about your infant club, know how to build a proper foundation for it so that way when you leave, and have someone to properly take care of the club themselves; it tends to take a period of 3 years to determine whether your club will live or burn out, so make sure to build a strong foundation.
Steps to raising an infant club

1. Check with whoever is in charge of handling your school's extracurriculars and see if the club has not been founded already. If you don't know who that is, check with your counselor - they'll be able to show you the way from there.
2. Find a teacher/staff who is willing (and suitable) to be the adviser and will let you use their room. Make sure you don't mind interacting with them all the time and that they are comfortable with you using their room.
3. Plan what day to have your meeting with that teacher. This takes more thinking than you would imagine. I.E. Mondays tend to be overtaken when we have 3/4-day weekends, Tuesdays are leadership class meetings (which are required), Wednesday tends to have shorter lunches, Thursdays tend to have the most clubs and on Fridays there are the most events at lunch. Stay away from planning your club on a day with a ton of clubs or with clubs that have a ton of members. You don't want to get into the competition yet. The days may vary from school to school.
4. Find and train your board/Write or revise your club constitution This is the moment you want to take to find a strong board to help you - no matter how strong a president, if the rest of his/her board falls, so does he/she. You only are as strong as your greatest weakness.  Some advice is plan ahead, get underclassmen to be on the board so they'll know how it works and be able to know what to do in the future. You also want to write your club constitution and get any paperwork out of the way during this period, this includes registering to the professional organization so you can go to events in the future. 
5. After all your paperwork has been approved you want to work on advertising - whether it's by word of mouth to huge blown-out posters posted on the walls of your school everywhere, this is where you'll work the popularity you have worked up for - talk to your friends and have them come and bring their friends. Have cute little promotions for example you can make a giant talk bubble that says "Speech and Debate 2014" or a highway sign that says "I can speak 100 miles a minute!" for people to take pictures with. One very useful event to debut your club is the club fair - when all the clubs introduce themselves to incoming underclassman and high schoolers looking for something to get involved in.
6. Plan events/attend events- you need something to update the members on, from competitions to scholarships to socials and fundraisers; there's a wide array of things you can do that will suit your club.
7. Find potential new board and install them/vote them in- I know this sounds shady, but you will want to keep an eye out for a competent person to keep the club together after you finish your term.

That's pretty much most of what you need to know. If you feel like it's necessary you can prepare specific binders with instructions and tips or journals of how events have gone and pass it on to the future board or you can have ready made power points that the new board can use.

Until next time dreamers-sweet dreams,

Marilyn Nguyen