With Club Day rapidly approaching, Youth Community Service (YCS) Club presidents Caterina Yuan and Elaine Chen prepare for another year of serving the local Palo Alto community.
Last year, YCS hosted many successful campus events, such as the Winter Formal, the Second Harvest food drive, which raised 8,292 pound of food for the needy, and Paly Service Day, which focuses on involving students in their community, and volunteered at the Moonlight Run and Family Service Day. According to Yuan and Chen, YCS is planning on hosting another formal after last year’s dance raised $10,000 for refugees in Darfur, Sudan.
"I think last year was a huge success," Chen said. "We are hosting Winter Formal again. I personally would like to keep the same set up. We are beginning to make plans for the dance and will have a meeting with the administrators sometime next week."
Other club leaders are already planning YCS’s participation part in the Moonlight Run, which raises money for the Palo Alto Weekly Holiday Fund which donates to Palo Alto charities, the Black-and-White Ball, which donates its earnings to the Palo Alto Recreation Foundation and the Palo Alto Partners in Education, and the grand opening of the Opportunity Center, an organization that will build homes for the homeless.
Though YCS attracted more than a hundred prospective members last year on Club Day, only forty to sixty members attended the first meeting and the attendance rate gradually declined as the year progressed.
"You can really only expect a small percentage of people who sign up for your club will actually be committed members." YCS Publicity Leader Elena Chacko said. Yuan agrees.
"The goal of YCS isn’t to attract as many people as possible. Getting 40-60 members on the first day is very successful," Yuan said. "Sign-ups at Club Day are not commitments to join the club. There is no way to prevent people from signing up and not coming, but we’d like to have members who come consistently."
YCS is not the only club with this problem though. Students often sign up for clubs on Club Day but never show up at meetings. Chacko cites the free treats you get if you sign up as the problem.
"Who can really blame them, though? It’s free food for starving teenagers at lunch."
Despite the general setbacks of low attendance rate, YCS hopes to accomplish as much, and even more, as they did last year.
"We’re really excited about the various community service projects and predict a great year for the club!" Maeve Coudreue, Co-Publicity YCS Leader, said.