NYC Member Blog Series: Club Transition
If you are part of your Red Cross club’s leadership and are soon to be graduating, you might be wondering, will your club know what to do after you leave? Will they know how to coordinate events with your local chapter or know the brand standard rules when creating a t-shirt design? You don’t want your club to reinvent the wheel every school year, just have a transition for the incoming leaders of the club! From the many years of running the Red Cross Club at the University of Southern California, I am soon faced with the thought of leaving my club in the hands of another. I will share with you my tips on preparing for your club’s future and how to make this process easier for you.
Transitioning your leadership can be as simple as a document and having a meeting to more elaborate plans to ensure that future leaders have the skills and necessary tools to run the club. For a more immediate transition, I would suggest the minimum of a document that explains the basic steps of certain tasks that the current leadership used and feedback on how it went, and tips on how they might have changed it or improved it. This will basically be a document of what do’s and don’ts for certain events and tasks, as well as suggestions on how to further improve the event. This should be followed up with an in person meeting between the old and new leadership teams to go over the transition document as well as allow for questions to be asked and brainstorming for the upcoming year.
A long term transition is to make guidelines for the age and structure of current leadership members. This could be as simple as having the ratio of underclassmen to upperclassmen at 50% or more. This will allow underclassmen leaders to develop and learn overtime the do’s and don’ts of how to run the club as well as allow the constant opportunity to ask someone older for help with their role. Personally, I have stepped down as president of my club last year, allowing another person to learn the ropes and become president this year, so that I can feel confident about letting go of the club. As a result, I put myself in a club advisor like role, a sort of emeritus for my final year of college to be a resource for our current leadership board. Just be sure not to run the club as this should be a learning process for the current president if you choose to play an advisory role.
If you have any specific questions for transitioning your current leadership or just tips for running your club, just shoot me an email at [email protected] and I will gladly help!
-Jeffrey Su
Jeffrey, like most kids, started volunteering with the American Red Cross in high school as a member. Currently an architecture major, Jeffrey spends his “free time” working on Red Cross stuff and helps local chapters in any way he can. Among his friends, he is known as the Red Cross guy and will continue to be as he goes into his third and final year on the council, excited and ready. You can contact Jeffrey at [email protected].
For Jeffrey and other NYC members’ full bios, click here.
