Key Club members treat their annual Fall Bash as a way to make lasting friendships with students in the CASTLE and FLS programs. Every October, they drop the volunteerism and spend a night having fun with their peers – spinning on the dance floor in the commons, getting their faces painted and going trick-or-treating throughout the hallways.
The reason they can do this? They have a strategic partnership with Edwardsville Peer Influence Club, according to senior Caroline James, Key Club president. While Key Club makes connections, EPIC runs the stations and accumulates volunteer hours. When EPIC hosts an event, Key Club members return the favor.
“If Key Club members are always on the volunteering side of events and not the actual hanging out and investing in relationships, then there’s not going to be any friendships made,” James said.
Identity groups and activism clubs often collaborate to reach goals. Senior Drew Sutherland, an EPIC officer, said this strategy can broaden a club’s impact.
“Key Club mainly helps kids in the CASTLE program [and] FLS kids,” Sutherland said. “We kind of help more general population kids. We want to create the opportunity for [students] to go both if they really want to and help out both groups of kids.”
Sutherland said it would be “counterintuitive” not to work together.
“We’re really just trying to make the community better,” he said. “Better the community, better the people, make sure everyone has a good time.”
James said it is necessary for the clubs to maintain two distinct identities and represent their separate subsects of the student body, even as they collaborate. She said the “small things” might be forgotten if one club took on too many issues.
“For instance, if we were to combine Educate with Key Club, that would be great, right?” James said. “But also, you’d sort of lose out on the specialties of the clubs by combining them together. Educate is all about diversity as a whole … but Key Club recognizes that there’s a real need for inclusion with kids with diverse abilities.”
In reality, Educate partners with Black Student Union. Together, they “spread awareness about Black culture,” according to junior Jazmin Hayes, an Educate member.
One of Educate’s core goals is to support other student organizations at EHS, according to Hayes. It saw an opportunity for collaboration when BSU was revived last semester.
“Last year we put together a bulletin board for Black History Month, which was really fun,” Hayes said. “In the past, people from Educate have attended [BSU] meetings and they’ve attended ours to see what types of things both clubs had planned and what things we could help each other with.”
Senior Mihlali Kapatamoyo is a member of both BSU and Educate, but takes on more of a leadership role in the latter. He said the relationship between the two groups allows them to “freely hang out together, create ideas together” and know that help is always available.
“When Black History Month hits, BSU needs Educate’s help as much as they can,” Kapatamoyo said. “Whenever Educate is doing a project about Pride Month, they need BSU’s help and also their artistic skills.”
Hayes said that the clubs can accomplish things together that they can’t do apart, like raising awareness about Black experiences in a large school community.
“It would only feel right to help them to spread that message instead of our club just doing it alone,” she said.