Looking for Club Officers and Team Members? How This Common Parent Task Builds Real Leadership for Kids
I was leaning against the elementary school cafeteria vending machine last month, wiping mud off my hiking boots after our monthly nature club walk, when I got the email. Our president and treasurer were stepping down at the end of the semester – their youngest kids were moving up to middle school, and they didn’t have time to stick around. I’d been coordinating the club for three years, so that meant I had to put out the call: we were looking for new officers and team members to keep the club going.
I posted the request to our parent Facebook group that night, half expecting a flood of volunteers. Instead, I got the same comments I always get: I’d love to, but I work full time. I’m too disorganized to be an officer. I can help at events, but I don’t want the responsibility. I was staring at the screen at 9:30 that night, eating cold leftover mac and cheese, when a new comment popped up from Sarah, a mom I’d met a few times at field trips. My 10-year-old Jax has been asking what he can do to help, she wrote. He says he’s not allowed to be in charge because he forgets things sometimes, but could he be trail snack officer?
I hesitated. For as long as I’d been part of the club, officers were always grown ups. We handled permits, the $500 annual budget, permission slip tracking – boring, grown up stuff that kids couldn’t be bothered with, right? But I also remembered Jax from the last hike: he’d spent 20 minutes helping a first grader tie his hiking boots, and he’d collected all the extra trash everyone left by the picnic table even though no one asked him to. I wrote back and said sure, come to the next planning meeting, we’ll figure it out.
Jax showed up with a spiral notebook covered in dinosaur stickers, and three different colored sticky notes. He said his only job requirement was he got to check that we had enough allergy-free snacks every week, and he could set three alarms on his mom’s phone to remember the cooler. If that was all, he could do it. We didn’t need anything else from him, I told him, and that was that.
Within a week, three more kids asked for jobs. Mia, a fourth grader who struggles with dyslexia and hates reading out loud in class, asked to be our social media team member – she loves taking photos of wild flowers and frogs on our hikes, and her dad helps her type captions if she gets stuck on words. Leo, a third grader who’s been sent to the office three times this year for talking too much during class, volunteered to be our outreach officer. He calls local park rangers and beekeepers to ask if they can come talk to the club, and he loves every minute of it. Two grown ups ended up volunteering to handle the budget and permits a week later, so we had our full team – half kids, half adults, nothing like the all-grown-up teams we’d had before.
That’s when I started noticing how different this year feels. I’ve always thought leadership was for the kids who got straight A’s, who never forgot their homework, who could stand up and give a speech in front of the whole school without getting nervous. That’s who we pick for student council, that’s who we ask to lead group projects, right? But Jax forgot the entire cooler of snacks on our hike last month, and I didn’t jump in to fix it like I would have a year ago. I just asked him what we should do. He went around to every kid, asked them to dump any extra snacks they had into a shared pile, and we ended up with more than enough to get through the hike. No one complained, no one went hungry, and Jax made a checklist taped to his front door that he checks every Wednesday before club now.
This is the thing no one tells you when you’re putting out a call for officers and team members for your parent-led group or classroom: you don’t have to reserve all the real roles for adults, or only for the kids who check all the “leadership” boxes. If you’re a teacher or a parent organizing anything, the concrete thing you can do is split big, intimidating roles into tiny, specific jobs that fit different kids’ strengths. Instead of one “event coordinator” role, you can have a snack checker, a photographer, a reminder sender, an attendance taker – jobs that only take 10 or 15 minutes a week, that a kid can do even if they struggle with organization or reading or sitting still. When a kid makes a mistake, don’t step in immediately – just ask them what they think they should do next. That’s the real leadership practice, not memorizing a speech for a student council election.
I used to worry that giving kids “official” roles would just create more work for me, that I’d end up fixing every mistake and covering for forgotten tasks anyway. But most of the time, the kids care more about their jobs than I expect them to. They build their own systems to work around their struggles, instead of me forcing a one-size-fits-all system that only works for a small number of kids. Jax’s sticky notes and multiple alarms work for him, even if it wouldn’t work for me. Mia taking photos works for her, even if she can’t write long captions on her own. Leo’s constant talking is an asset for his job, not a problem to correct.
We’re already putting out our call for officers and team members for next fall, and we’re explicitly adding kid roles to the post now. We still have messy moments: Mia once posted a blurry photo of a gray squirrel that she thought was a black bear, and we left it up because everyone loved it. Jox still misses a reminder every few months, but he’s gotten really good at problem solving when he does. It’s not the perfectly organized team I thought I wanted when I first put out that call. But it’s ours, and more kids feel like they belong than ever before. I still don’t know if we’ll get enough grown up volunteers next year, but I know we’ve got a whole group of kids who are ready to step up. That’s more than I could have asked for.
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