Sanjna Sood

Crystal Chu performs the signature Key Club hand signal during the recent Fall Rally North preparation event in South San Francisco.

With over 100 members at Carlmont, Key Club provides many volunteer and leadership opportunities to students looking to help the community around them. Being such a large group, they have to be very meticulous with their planning.

The club has a president, vice president, several other leadership positions, as well as five different committees; publicity, member development, fundraising, service, and social events. Each committee has its own duties and tasks to contribute to the club as a whole.

“We have our service committee work on finding events in our community. Then we promote the event via our publicity committee, which then creates graphics, sends our reminds, emails, updates websites and social media,” said Sanjna Sood, a vice president of Key Club.

With five different committees, each committee needs supervision from others, which is what the president and vice presidents do; their primary goals being to serve and help their members.

“I work with our club’s various committees. I also work on the connection between our club and division and general guidance and organization,” said Sanjna Sood, a vice president of Key Club.

While Sood helps oversee the club, most members attend monthly club meetings and different volunteer events; all included on their website and Instagram. 

“A normal member attends club meetings, completes service at events, gets awards for competing lots of services, signs up for leadership training, attends socials, or contributes to fundraisers,” Sood said.

It can be challenging to communicate with every member with such a large club, so the publicity committee helps advertise events that members can participate in. 

“We curate different social events to bring our club closer together, whether it’s bonding or a Zoom icebreaker before meeting so we can interact with each other,” said Erica Tan, the chair of the Social Events Committee.

Despite the organization within the club, even Key Club occasionally has issues in strategizing and arranging their plans.

“Sometimes events turn up at the very last minute, so we have less time to promote. We need to remind people that are attending events that they have to communicate with the designated service project organizer in case something comes up,” Sood said.

The president oversees everything planned and finds different events or fundraiser ideas to delegate to the service committee members. 

“Service project chairs fill out a google doc with all the information that is needed to go in the email, graphics, and remind, and publicity gets these docs and prepares them four weeks in advance of the event,” Sood said. 

Key Club is well-known for their community service around Carlmont and local communities, though not many students aren’t aware of the careful planning and teamwork that goes into each event.

“You get to have a lot of different experiences; it’s not very focused on only one particular subject. You can do something cool with your community,” Sood said.