We’ve all experienced it: that day at the beginning of freshman year, when herds of wide-eyed Jesuit newcomers flock into the cafeteria to find innumerable, brightly decorated tables manned by squawking club moderators lobbying for attention, incessantly insisting that the freshmen sign up for their club.
Of course, the ping pong club table is always surrounded by freshmen eager to get their names on the list in the hopes that they can play ping pong with their friends during their free periods and after school. But many students at Jesuit participate in other clubs like the medical society, the environmental club, and the cycling club, to name a few.
Every year Jesuit clubs like these grow with the incoming classes of freshmen looking to join something new, the countless frantic sophomores and juniors scrambling to load up their resumes for college applications, and the people in between who are just trying to find peers to share their hobbies with and make some new friends along the way. Suffice it to say that everyone at Jesuit has had a little taste of what it’s like to be in a club.
However, what many overlook is the tremendous planning and effort it takes to maintain a successful club at Jesuit. Sure, it’s easy to get distracted by all the bells and whistles each club uses to promote its cause and the seemingly too-good-to-be-true benefits that come from joining these clubs.
But if you stop playing games on your smart phones and laptops in homeroom and pay attention during the morning announcements, you’ll see that club fundraisers and charity opportunities are always going on and need your help.
But these opportunities don’t arise overnight; it takes weeks of planning and preparation to run a Jesuit club event. It takes time, cooperation, a little bit of creativity, and, perhaps most importantly, money. Sure, donations from parents and club members will take a club a certain distance, but clubs can only ask so much from their members in the way of funds. That’s where Student Council comes in.
Once each semester, according to Student Council president Tim Nguyen ’12, clubs can send in a funding request that details how much money they need with a maximum of two thousand dollars per club, as well as the reason for the request for funds. Reasons for funding include lodging and transportation for trips, funding for charity events, and simply augmenting a club’s budget.
Student Council stresses that completion of these forms does not guarantee funding and that requests must be signed by the club moderator. Nguyen also says that clubs have the option of presenting their proposal for donations at a meeting. After presentations and all donation request forms are collected, the council deliberates and takes a vote to decide who gets paid.
Of course, there are always those who get denied. This year, the Anime Club was denied $225 of funding for club t-shirts. They, obviously, would argue that $225 is not a hefty price to pay compared to staggering requests reaching the maximum of two thousand dollars. But, according to Student Council member Matt Mazzini ’14, Student Council simply couldn’t afford to fund that club because of the many other requests for funds from other Jesuit clubs and sports teams.
Some of these include the cycling club, the angler’s club, and the Jesuit rugby team. “The cycling club acts like an athletic team,” says theology teacher Andrew Armstrong, the cycling club moderator. Unfortunately, they receive no funding from the Jesuit athletic department because they technically are not an athletic team. So, they requested that the student council grant them $1,750 to purchase and outfit a trailer to aid with transportation of bikes to cycling events across the state, and the student council accepted their request. Armstrong goes on saying “We were very excited by this opportunity and thankful for the funding assistance. Thus far since our founding the cycling club’s budget comes solely from our fund raising efforts so the grant from Student Council is helping us invest in the club enabling us to better accommodate our continued growth.”
The environmental club, also moderated by Mr. Andrew Armstrong, received $800 to contribute to increasing recycling around the Jesuit campus. They plan on using the money to purchase new recycling bins for paper, cans, and bottles all clearly labeled and easy for students to identify and use. They feel that this will be a step in the right direction toward changing Jesuit into a “greener” school.
The angler’s club requested $1,200 from the student council to help them fund an angling event that benefits mentally ill children around the city of Dallas. Matt Mazzini ’14 described them as an “upstart” club with 36 members, looking to grow and help out the community, so they were granted their request.
The rugby team, led by coach Anthony Mattacchione, was granted the maximum two thousand dollars to aid in funding trips to El Paso and New Orleans for the team. As Coach Mattachione explains, rugby’s funding from the athletic department is not enough to sufficiently fund the team’s endeavors.
“We mainly needed the funding for our trips,” says Mr. Mattachione. “In any given year, we have between seven and ten kids [on the Rugby team] who are on work grant. Many of these kids don’t have the money to play other sports that demand a fee. We want everyone to be able to participate, so when the opportunity came to supplement our funding, we took it.” Mattachione went on to say that, without the student council’s funding, work grant students on the rugby team “could never afford to travel with the team.”
Some other clubs that received the full $2,000 grant from the student council included the Medical Society, Brothers to Others, and the Engineering and Robotics club. The Medical Society requested the money to make ground transportation easier for their upcoming trip to Guatemala in which the members of the society will be doing mission work. Brothers to Others, a club of approximately 30, was looking for some funds to just make general events easier and make the club a more tangible option for students looking to join. The Engineering and Robotics club recently lost several sponsors and needed to raise up to 14,000 dollars, so they requested help from student government.
So where does all this money come from, and who cares about all these clubs? It has to be difficult to grant thousands of dollars to multiple clubs at Jesuit and even more difficult to trust that the clubs will spend their grants responsibly.
But Nguyen and the student council have faith in these clubs and their members, and they generously use proceeds from homecoming festivities as well as a portion of tuition coming from student IDs to help fund Jesuit clubs. These clubs work to help out the Dallas community and to allow Jesuit students to create many new relationships and skills that will stay with them throughout their lives.
Those wide-eyed freshmen will find a welcoming and comfortable environment in a club with people who share their interests. As far as Student Council is concerned, funding clubs is a worthy cause and with all the benefits they present to Jesuit and the community, it’s the least they can do.
