By Holly Breuer

What is a club at Winsor? The answer may seem simple: a club is a group of people you meet with once a week at lunch because you share a common interest, or affinity, or goal. But this year Winsor’s community government, Collect, is looking to reevaluate what it really means to be a club.

The intent behind this process is twofold: first, to identify what the Winsor community has the potential to and should gain from the club program, and second, to evaluate how current and potential Winsor clubs compare to such a standard. When Collect examines club proposals each spring, factors like a distribution of different types of clubs, space and advisor limitations, and scheduling concerns play a role in decisions to approve or deny club requests, but the club itself is evaluated with care, too. This year, Collect hopes to give student club leaders a guide to what is expected of a club and prospective club leaders a set of criteria against which Collect judges clubs proposed for the upcoming school year.

Though the Winsor Family Handbook states that “clubs allow students to pursue interests they already have or explore new ones with one another,” the core belief behind the clubs evaluation is that clubs at Winsor are, or should be, more than just a group of people with whom you share something in common. Perhaps they might include having community involvement, problem-solving, or being a place to connect with members of difference classes; perhaps something else. In the quest to develop a definition of what Winsor clubs should be, Collect intends to consider the question of what that “more” means this year, but, most importantly, it wishes to pose the question to Winsor’s Upper School students. In the words of Regina Noonan ’13, Collect president, “We’re revisiting the idea of clubs at Winsor because we want them to be as effective as possible. There is a wide range of clubs at Winsor, and we hope that, by re-considering what it means to be a club, each club can have a more meaningful and active place in the community.”

The clubs discussion will be occurring all this school year. Join Collect at lunch on Tuesdays and Fridays in Room 206 to take part in the conversation.