Every year, students are encouraged to come up with ideas for new clubs. This requires them to create and finalize their plan, find an advisor, and promote the club to newcomers. This year, there are a number of new clubs, including — but not limited to — Latina Empowerment Club, Adoption Club, and the LASA Jew Crew.
Junior Isa Matamoros founded the Latina Empowerment club to celebrate and learn about Latina culture. She first had the idea to create the club after participating in Young Women’s Leadership Challenge, a summer program that encouraged her to take charge.
“Basically, throughout the year I’m supposed to create a club, event, fundraise, and more to benefit my community,” Matamoros said. “It took me a while to decide what I wanted to do at first, but after a bit of thinking, I found something that I’m really interested in.”
While deciding on what to create was a challenge for Matamoros, founding the club itself was a breeze. She said that the process of setting up the club at LASA was remarkably straightforward.
“I reached out to some friends so that they could help me out as club leadership, and I reached out to Ms. Aguayo to be my club sponsor,” Matamoros said. “Thankfully, she said yes. After that, all I had to do was fill out the club form, and then we were good.”
Emma Steinert, a senior at LASA, created the Adoption Club, open to students who are adopted or have any relation to adoption. To her, there were clear benefits to forming a space for students to tell their stories and learn new perspectives.
“I think it’s good for awareness’s sake,” Steinert said. “There’s a lot of stereotyping in America, so I think spreading awareness, being conscious of what you say [is important].”
Scarlett Neulander is the co-founder of the LASA Jew Crew, a club that spends time talking about Jewish culture. The club also serves as a place to meet and make friends with people from the same community. Neulander mentioned another benefit to creating a new club: looking good on college applications.
“I mean I get to put it on my college apps, which is pretty nice,” Neulander said. “I don’t know [what else.] I mean, I’m just doing this for fun.”
There are over 100 competing clubs at LASA, so Steinert said that promotion was a major challenge when forming a new one. There were a variety of difficulties that came with getting the Adoption Club’s name out.
“It’s been a little difficult, just because it’s kind of hard to phrase, ‘would you like to come to the adoption club?’,” Steinert said. “So that’s been difficult. It’s also just very new — as in last week — so I don’t know. It will become what it’ll become, I don’t need it to be huge. I don’t want it to be small like just my friend group, because then it’s only beneficial to me. We’ve put up posters and we [planned] to do announcements, but with the club fair, we were like… ‘we’ll start next week!’”
Matamoros explained the importance of keeping the Latina Empowerment club going in the future. To her, the club represents the importance of being a connected group and having a supportive community.
“It’s no secret that LASA is a very competitive environment, and we should definitely have support systems to help people go and feel motivated,” Matamoros said. “I’m hoping that this club can [help] achieve this goal, especially for a group like Latinas where it feels like we could and should make a better effort to be more connected. If all goes well and this club continues in the future, we would be continuing the cycle of community building and support.”
