Short Guide to Being a Campus Organizer

Whether you’re into environmentalism or feminism, building houses or working in soup kitchens, there’s bound to be an organization out there that will gladly put you to use. You can bring your passion onto campus by becoming a campus representative or community organizer for that particular organization.

The group may already have a program for volunteers like you to help organize teams of volunteers on campus; check with them to see if they do. If they don’t, ask if they would allow you to be a campus representative or organizer.

As the organizer, you may be expected to recruit members, organize activities and meetings, and serve as the main connection between the organization and the group. Your duties could include taking attendance, documenting the hours spent on projects, maintaining member contact information, and other tasks. You may want to establish officers to help with various duties, too.

Some activities you can do as a group, besides holding meetings to plan them and go over goals, include creating displays for campus events (such as posters about your cause), creating flyers or pamphlets and distributing them, fundraising, making t-shirts or stickers for the cause, canvassing, phone banking or registering voters during an election, circulating a petition, and holding trainings to do these activities and others. Always be sure to okay these activities with the organization you’re working for prior to doing them.

The organization itself may even have activities for your group to do, such as office or clerical work, errands, phone banking, or on-campus awareness or visibility events. Some of these may seem tedious, but every organization depends on its volunteers to get the job done—even if it’s through licking envelopes!

Depending on your organization, there are surely lots of specific activities you can plan as well. For example, if you are an animal rights group, you may want to volunteer at the local shelter on a weekly or monthly basis. If you are an environmental group, you might clean up a park. Maybe you’re a mentoring group, in which case you could tutor kids for a designated number of hours each week.

You may also wish to create a website or newsletter to keep in touch. You can do this easily with free web hosting, such as WordPress, or you may even want to create a Facebook group or MySpace page.

If you choose to create a newsletter, you may wish to make it an e-newsletter to curb costs. You may want to include actions to take—either sponsored by the organization or things you’ll be doing on campus—as well as important dates or meetings to remember, notes from meetings, inspirational quotes or websites for more information, and even legislative contact information if there is a special campaign going on that you want the group to address.

For more information about campus organizing, visit the Citizen Works website.