By Katie Wedemeyer
The second of two articles on Campus Ecology Clubs and how to start one.

Starting an Ecology Club on your campus is easy to do, and will provide needed support for Ecology majors. While each University has specific requirements for starting new clubs, the basic steps are all as follows:

1. Find a group of interested students. At most schools you need about 8-12 founding members. To find this group of like-minded students you can post fliers up around the department building, outside of Ecology classes, or even make announcements in your classes.

2. Find a faculty advisor. Go to office hours, tell your professors that you’re interested in starting a club, if they can’t help you they may know of a college that will be interested. Most likely, they will be excited that you want to take the initiative to start the club, and will be happy to help.

3. Call an initial interest meeting including the faculty advisor and interested students. The best way to do this is once you have a faculty advisor, ask them to send out an e-blast to all students in the major (most faculty members have the access to this listserve).

4. Write a Constitution. Most likely, your schools student association will have sample constitutions available for you to model yours after, but generally they will the constitution to include the following:

A. Create a mission statement. Go back to your middle school basics: who, what, where, when, why. Who is this club going to serve, what is the overall purpose of the club, where will it be located, and why it is important to form this club.

B. Requirements for membership. Is it strictly and undergraduate club? Do all members need to be full time students? Do they need to commit to a certain amount of events? These are flexible and ultimately up to the founding member group to decide. I suggest, when starting a brand new club, that having fairly general membership requirements is the best route so that word can get out and you can reach as many people as possible.

C. Frequency of meetings. This again, is totally up to your founding members (unless otherwise regulated by your university). Once a month is a good starting point (at least for general members, core members can meet twice a month to plan events). This will hopefully generate greater attendance, because as we all know college students are extremely busy and may not have time or be intimidated by a commitment to weekly meetings. Once a month meetings also allows you to have time to plan events, and to make each meeting a quality interaction, rather than having to find topics or activities to fill time with on a weekly basis.

D. Officer Positions. Decide on how many and what officer positions your club will require. I would suggest, in the beginning, to go simple with the following positions:

i. President is in charge of running meetings and collaborating with the Faculty Advisor and the founding members. In charge of registering the club for official club status at your university.

ii. Vice president assists the president as needed, and when the president is unavailable for a meeting the VP will run the meeting

iii. Secretary takes minutes at the meeting and distributes them to club members

iv. Public Relations. To work tables at on campus club events (contact your Associated Students for information on these events), to pass out/post fliers around campus, and to explore other avenues of publicizing the club (facebook group, blogs, listserve e-blasts, etc.)

v. Partner Liason. To register your club, to be affiliated national organizations, such as Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability (SEEDS; http://www.esa.org/seeds/), The Green Initative Fund (TGIF; http://votetgif.com/), California Native Plant Society (CNPS; http://cnps.org/), etc. I only use these organizations as examples because they are the ones that EBE at UCSD are affiliated with.

E. Name a faculty advisor. See step 2.

F. Finances. If your group is going to require funding check with your university’s associated students for their specific requirements regarding funding requests, as they differ between campus.

G. Affiliation with other groups. See D.-v. for examples. Make sure to check for local groups/organizations/companies that may be offering community partnerships with local universities.

H. Organization contact information. You will generally need to provide local contact information both during the school year and holiday breaks, including email address, mailing address, and telephone number. The president is a good contact to use, or the faculty advisor if they are willing, since they will generally be around campus all year round.

5. File for official club status. Nearly every university requires campus clubs to register for official club status at the start of every school year. This is required to receive recognition from your university – including any financial support from your associated students, and privileges for meeting spaces.

6. Host your first meeting! Your first meeting doesn’t need to be anything complicated, just a general meet and greet, if you can provide refreshments that’s always a good way to inspire attendance by busy college students. Go back to your elementary school roots here, at least for the first part of the meeting, and organize a few ice breaker games so you can all get to know each other without any pressure or intimidation. Then it’s always good to discuss what everyone hopes to get out of the club – what kind of events, activities, lectures etc. the group is interested in attending.

Once you’ve had your club started you can really take it in any direction that best suits your campus’ needs – a lecture series, community outreaches, volunteer and internship forums, on-campus opportunities, etc. Make sure to keep up to date on your schools particular club policies, and most importantly, have fun and relish in your newfound group of eco-geeks!

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