Older service clubs face low participation as student interest shifts

At lunch on a recent Thursday, senior Hanna Zahabi walked into room 603 for a California Scholarship Federation (CSF) meeting, and greeted 11 other students (mostly sophomores, juniors and seniors). Among them were her two sisters and other officers. Zahabi is the president of CSF, a club that has been at SHS since the ‘90s.

On the same Thursday, about 40 students (mostly freshmen) crowded the tables in English teacher Susanna Ryan’s room (003) for a Leo Club meeting and listened to officers freshman officers Selina Chen and Anouk Yeh present a slideshow. They recapped members on multiple club-wide projects like a homeless benefit drive at Redwood Middle School and offered numerous volunteer opportunities such as playing music at the Senior Center, helping out at the Argonaut Carnival and the Redwood Middle School community fair, and running a Hot Chocolate Fundraiser at SHS.

While new underclassman-run service clubs like Leo Club gained popularity this year, attention has shifted away from longer-established service clubs to ones run by underclassmen.

“Club participation is shifting, and that’s just a cycle that happens over the years,” senior club commissioner Samyu Iyer said. “I think that is natural, and upperclassmen tend to go off campus more than they want to go to club meetings, so those clubs are starting to fizzle out and the underclassmen clubs are starting to rise.”

Even so, the addition of new clubs this year has not made a net change on the number of clubs compared to last year since former club officers graduate or voluntarily terminate their clubs.

The ASB Club Handbook requires a minimum of seven members, lowered from 10 members last year, not including officers, at each club meeting. Iyer said that this requirement is more similar to a guideline to encourage clubs to reach out to the student body by posting more on social media or gaining recognition by directly talking to students.

“Even if a club has only five people showing up, that's still five students on this campus united over one thing,” Iyer said. “If it’s really just your friend group of four to five people just chilling and eating together and calling it a club meeting, then that's where we ask if you need to be a school-sanctioned club with a bank account and all the things that come with it.”

Especially for clubs that require ASB endorsement to manage funds and function, failing to compensate for the lost interest of displaced students can threaten the club’s life and productivity.

HERO club, which uses its funds to buy supplies for its care packages for the homeless, involves member participation outside of school to hand out care packages at planned walks in San Jose. Low member involvement not only makes club functions tough to organize but can also hurt the club’s morale.

“For one walk, we could not get much participation, which really affected the spirit of the club,” sophomore secretary  Erica Lee said. “We tried advertising to freshmen by telling them it’s a good way to get volunteer hours, but that brought freshmen to the assembly, not the actual walk.”

CSF is based on serving the community with student scholarships and organizing events like the school-wide gift exchange between students and staff throughout the year.

Without the ability to organize larger events with wide member participation, CSF can only make members aware of individual volunteering opportunities that they can sign up for through CSF.

The club continues to make outreach efforts by inviting friends to participate in meetings and posting on social media. With the participation of more students, Zahabi said the club would want to have many more on-campus events.

“It’s harder to spread awareness or advertise at school without the extra members,” Zahabi said. “There’s less presence in the community, just because we don’t have enough people.”

But a smaller club size has its strengths, too, Zahabi said.

With fewer people, club members become more familiar with each other and decisions about club functions are made quickly and easily, which makes meetings shorter, for better or for worse.

“Everyone is able to communicate with everyone,” Zahabi said. “Nobody is worried about ‘Oh, the officers are listening to usk,’ and everyone is on the same level of contribution rather than two or three people running the club.”

With the yearly variation of club involvement, students will ultimately associate with clubs that interest them the most, especially with various activities and off-campus food luring students’ attention.

“People should not be scared to join clubs,” Zahabi said. “It’s super chill; they can take some time off of one day at lunch to hang out with different people.”