The Reality of Starting a Club at UCalgary

Do you want to start a club at UCalgary? That's great! With over 200 clubs already on campus, you'd think it's a pretty straightforward process. Well, yes and no. The process is theoretically easy and straightforward, but there are a bunch of little things the official guides don't quite tell you that might trip you up. So, here's what I learned from starting the UCalgary Cheese Club!

Start the Application Process Early... Very Early

First things first: all new club requests are due once per year on May 15th. If you miss that deadline, then you're waiting until next year.

The actual paperwork is very doable, you just need:

• A constitution (the instructions for this are very clear)
• At least 20 members (gather your friends!)
  
• A few executives willing to help run things

The full official details are here if you want to dive deeper.

Finding Your People

Before you finish your application, you need to submit a list of club executives. Your executives don't need to be your immediate friends, especially if they don't share the same interest in whatever your club is about. There are definitely people on-campus who would love to be involved with your club, so try:

• Posting on the UCalgary subreddit
• Reaching out to similar clubs or interest groups
• Spreading the word among your network

Finding dedicated people who actually want to help manage things with you makes everything so much easier!

The Bank Account Ordeal

Once your club is actually approved, you need to open a bank account. Most clubs use BMO (the official choice of the SU), so I went with them too. They usually don't meet with clubs on-campus until mid-September, and there are a lot of administrative items that need to be checked off. This means that your first funded events won't happen until early October at the earliest, so plan accordingly!

For what it's worth, we opened an eBusiness account with BMO which lets you receive unlimited e-transfers (at the time of writing).

The Ticketing Trap

For Cheese Club, unfortunately cheese costs money, and SU funding doesn't cover everything, so we need to charge participants. Here's something we didn't realize: if you make your event ticketed (like charging $5 per entry), you lose your free room booking, and in our case that would've cost $80.

Instead, we decided to make our events free and open to everyone for socializing, with the actual cheese as an optional add-on. That way, we keep the free room booking since the event itself is accessible to all.

This is a pretty specific example, but clubs can often run into similar bureaucratic issues that are not made clear in the Clubs Manual. It can be helpful to talk to executives at clubs that are structured similarly to find out how they submit and run their events.

Just Run Some Events

New clubs often run into the trap of overplanning their first events, and there's nothing better than trial and error when it comes to improving your event delivery. Your first few events might be messy, and even an established club will run into issues, especially if trying new things!

What's important is to try to get things rolling at the beginning so that you have momentum to continue. Otherwise, you might end up hosting a lot less events each semester than you'd hoped for.

The Bottom Line

Starting a club is rewarding, fun, and doable, but it does require more planning and patience than most expect upfront. Make sure to start early, check deadlines, and find people who are excited to help with your events. Remember that every club on-campus has been through the same growing pains!

Hope this helps you start your awesome club at UCalgary next year :)

- Ana