A booming number of clubs have been forming more often now than in recent years, which has led students to being stretched between multiple clubs and forced them to divide their time and effort amongst various organizations.
Over the last couple of years, there has been a near 25% increase from 47 clubs to 59 in clubs forming—especially cultural and STEM focused clubs—that have been far more active than in years past.
As a club president myself, I find it more difficult to rally members together in the Class of 2025 Pep Club and build engagement within the class. Often, I’m left with only a few members at each of our meetings that already occur seldomly, every two weeks.
These new groups have also hampered other clubs when it comes to being involved in various school functions, such as Food Fest and assemblies. A large number of clubs can also cause issues when dealing with prioritizing clubs. An example of this struggle is during the September Food Fest where over 30 clubs had booths and many generated far less profit than expected because so many clubs were selling food.
Even though the ASB has changed the policy for the next Food Festival, I still believe more can be done to help narrow down the long club registry and grow engagement by merging clubs with common missions and having more Club Days to increase visibility. Hopefully this will attract students who may be interested in starting their own clubs to join existing clubs with a similar goal.
Another way to take more administrative control is by increasing the number of founding members required to form a club and by limiting the number of meetings that can go on per day at certain times so clubs are spread more evenly and don’t overlap as often.
If the formation of clubs continues to grow, students will have too many organizations to pick from, making it more difficult to decide which ones to join, if any at all. This could lead potential participants to opt not to join or to join too many which could cause them to not show up because of difficulties prioritizing which meetings and events to attend.
