To give a little bit of a backstory, it was the Fall of 2021 when I wanted to join Horticulture Club. I wanted to learn more outside of my Horticulture classes all the fun ways I can interact with plants.
However, I would soon found out that it would become near-impossible to find details about this club!
I didn't find them at ISU's Clubfest, which is a huge event where active clubs and organizations get together to attract students interested in joining extracurriculars. I searched through their inactive Facebook. I looked at their barren official website and couldn't find a meeting update or a piece of contact information. I went through three different Horticulture Club websites that haven't been updated since 2018. I thought all hope was lost until I found the email of the faculty adviser that overlooks the club. I prayed that they were still a staff member at ISU, and luckily they were! The adviser got me in contact with the previous President of the Horticulture Club. She gave me the information of the next meeting, and I was thrilled to join!
However, the next meeting day was not expressed. I assumed that the club met weekly as it is the most common way clubs perform. When I showed up the next week, no one was there. Luckily, I ended up finding the President of the club in the building and I asked her where everyone was. She forgot to inform me that meetings were every other week.
From then on, I could see the little and big ways this club lacked in communicating with each other and with new members. As a newcomer and non-major, I felt like a bit of an outsider in the beginning. It was hard to communicate with other members during conversations that discussed common classes they shared and the amount knowledge about plants they already had. When you're new to soil, plants, and environmental topics - sometimes the usage of niche terms can sound like another language! I noticed the way the exec members struggled with overfamiliarity when talking about events, sales, and club committees and didn't express the who/what/when/where of the situation since the majority of members already knew. I also noticed that executive members would struggle to communicate with each other as well.
As a solution-oriented person, I wanted to take action to solve these prevalent issues. When I was nominated by my peers to become the Promotions Co-Chair for the Spring 2022-Fall 2022 term, I gladly accepted. Not only was this position a chance to get closer to my peers, but also address some of the obstacles the club has in attracting and maintaining new members. While my fellow Co-Chair and I began preparing for the next Clubfest, the first thing I worked on independently was posting the meeting dates on our club's Instagram.
It was my first time using Canva for our Instagram. There is some noticeable discoloration of the posts which did not appear when I was using Canva. I'm unsure why they came out yellow in some areas and beige-green in others. However, I made sure to double-check my uploads since then so that this issue doesn't persist. Fortunately, this concern only happened once!
I found out later that Horticulture Club took a big hit when the pandemic occurred. They used to be a huge organization, and when I first arrived it was merely a fraction of what it used to be. Getting to know the amazing people in this club and participating in their fun events makes me passionate to get us back to the standard we were before the Covid-19 era - and then go to reach higher peaks than that! I want everyone to know about Horticulture Club. I love seeing how my work can cause growth for a club that has so much valuable knowledge that could solve world problems like mental health, food production, sustainability, and much more.
Since making my first-ever post - I met new members who thanked me for posting about the meeting information in advance so that they could clear their schedules to come. In particular, one student who is a Mechanical Engineering major had a similar story as mine. He was interested in joining the Horticulture Club in the Fall of 2021, and tried to search for information about the club but didn't have any luck finding it until this current semester. When I heard his story, I was very touched that the first thing I did in my position was able to bring interested people like him to this excellent club.
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