Looking for Club Officers and Team Members? How This Builds Kids’ Real-World Skills
Last Wednesday, I was folding neon green fliers for our elementary school’s outdoor adventure club by the copy machine when Ms. Lopez, the 4th grade teacher, stopped me. The machine was still warm from a 20-page jam I’d just cleared, and the flier’s big bold line read “Looking for Officers and Team Members – All Grades Welcome.” “You’re actually letting any kid sign up to apply?” she said. “Most groups I know just pick the most responsible kid or the PTA board member’s child. Isn’t that easier?”
She wasn’t wrong. Three years ago, when I first started the club, that’s exactly what I did. I picked the bubbly 5th grader everyone already knew as president, assigned the quiet kid who drew great murals to do our fliers, and called it a day. That year, all the actual planning ended up on me and my two parent helpers. I forgot to reserve the picnic shelter for our end-of-year hike, and we ended up eating granola bars on a muddy slope in the rain. The president I’d picked was nice, but she never showed up to after-school planning meetings – it was just a title I’d given her, not something she’d asked for. The art kid did great on the fliers, but no one else stepped up for anything else. I left that first year exhausted, wondering if the club was even worth it.
The next year, on a whim, I tried the open call. I printed fliers that just said we were looking for any kid who wanted a role, officer or team member, no experience required. To apply, they just had to leave one sentence (or a drawing, for younger kids) in the folder by the cafeteria door saying what they wanted to work on. I expected three or four applications. I got 11.
A quiet 3rd grader with dirt permanently under his fingernails, who never raised his hand in our weekly meetings, applied for the geocache planning team. His one sentence read: “I want to hide three new geocaches for our spring hike.” A chatty 5th grader who’d never finished any after-school activity he’d signed up for applied for president, writing: “I don’t want anyone to have to walk at the back alone.” They both won their roles in our kid-led vote, and I spent the first two weeks second-guessing the whole thing.
I shouldn’t have. The 5th grader showed up to the first planning meeting 10 minutes early with a crumpled list of topics, covered in doodles of dinosaurs. He stopped every five minutes to ask the quiet kids what they thought, instead of talking over everyone like I’d expected. The 3rd grader didn’t say much in big meetings, but he emailed me every Sunday (with a little help from his mom) with updates. He called the parks department himself to get permission to hide our geocaches, and made hand-drawn clue sheets for every club member. When the president forgot to send out reminders for our trail clean-up day, and only three kids showed up, I didn’t step in to fix it. I just leaned against a tree and asked the team what they thought they should do. The president decided to reschedule, made hand-written reminders for every kid’s locker, and brought chocolate chip cookies to the next meeting to apologize. No one was mad, and the next turn out was twice as big.
That’s the thing no one tells you when you’re starting a kid-led group: when you put out an open call for officers and team members, you don’t just fill slots. You let kids pick roles that actually matter to them, instead of getting stuck with whatever an adult thinks they should do. It’s not that outgoing kids can’t be great leaders – it’s that the quiet kid who geocaches every weekend cares more about planning a hike than the popular kid who only took the title because her mom asked her to.
There are a few small, easy things I do that make this work, that any parent or teacher can steal. First, keep the application super low-effort. No long essays, no teacher recommendations required. One sentence or a drawing is enough. This lets even shy or younger kids participate without stress. Second, don’t stick to a fixed list of officer roles. If three kids want to help plan snacks, make a snack team. If one kid just wants to take photos at every event, that’s an official role: club historian. I’ve got a 2nd grader this year who just wants to point out different trees on hikes, so we made him our official nature guide. Third, every kid who applies gets a spot. Even if we only have four officer spots, the other applicants join the planning team with their own small job. No one goes home empty-handed.
This year, we put out our new fliers, and we got 17 applicants. I don’t know if the 2nd grade nature guide will remember all 20 tree names he’s been practicing for our first hike. I don’t know if the new vice president, who gets distracted easily during meetings, will remember to send the t-shirt order in on time. Some weeks, it’s more work for me to step back and let the kids fix their mistakes instead of just doing it myself. Last month, we still ended up with too many granola bars and not enough juice for a hike, because the snack team miscalculated how many people were coming. That’s okay. We shared, and no one went hungry.
Last week, the 3rd grade geocache officer from two years ago stopped me after club. He’s in 5th grade now, and he told me he started a small geocache group with his neighborhood friends, and they just hid their sixth cache together. That’s the thing you don’t get when you pick all the roles yourself: kids don’t just learn how to plan a hike. They learn that if they want a role, they can ask for it. We still have messy meetings, we still forget things, and it still doesn’t always go as planned. But right now, that’s good enough for me.
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