What do you want to accomplish?
Do you want to raise awareness in your school? Raise money to help prevent domestic violence and abusive relationships? The first step is to make a decision about what you want to accomplish. Establishing a main goal or purpose will help to focus and guide you through the process. Your main goal should be broad but also specific enough that others can understand the purpose. An example could be to educate your school, to provide support in your community, or whatever you are interested in. Here are some things that may help you to figure out what you want to accomplish. Try to focus on one goal to start with; as you build momentum you can broaden your focus to include additional goals.
Educate others Provide information and support
Volunteer Help to change policies
How are you going to make it happen?
Once you have an idea of what your purpose is. Start to think about the process you need to go through to accomplish your goal. There are so many options and ways you can choose to get involved. This toolkit provides a list of ways you can get involved and a guideline of how to get started.
Start new? Or join in?
To achieve the goal or purpose that you have created, you do not have to start a club from scratch. For example, there could be an already existing club that would be willing to take on an idea or project. It’s important to review all your options before making a decision. There are both pros and cons to starting a club or integrating into a club. By starting your own club, there is a lot of work that goes into it, but you could have a bigger and longer impact. By integrating into another club, however, you already have an established support system and like minded people willing to work. When interviewing successful students who have started their own club, they made that decision because there were really no other clubs like the ones they started. However, they did mention that starting your own club was a lot of work and it would have been easier if they had joined another club. In this situation, evaluate your options and see which one would work best for you.