In August 2019, one of my best friends at Brown, Caterina Prestia, asked me if I wanted to start a student group with her. The group she wanted to bring to Brown was called Circle of Women, a student run non-profit organization focused on increasing access to education for girls. As an International and Public Affairs major focusing on development, education and health access have always been topics of major interest to me, I’d just never had the chance to engage with them in a non-academic context. Starting Circle at Brown seemed like the perfect way to bring awareness to this issue on Brown’s campus, gain valuable experience and knowledge in working with nonprofits, and make a tangible impact.
Getting Circle approved as a student group was a bureaucratic but not particularly difficult process. We had to apply through Brown’s Student Activities Organization, go through an interview and review process, and put together several promotional and explanatory materials. By the end of November, we were notified that we were officially accepted to be a student group starting January 20th, 2020. We were thrilled and motivated to hit the ground running.
In January, we held a table at the Activities Fair, having worked hard to put together a both aesthetically pleasing, eye catching, and informative poster for our table (with freshly baked chocolate chip cookies for added incentive). We needed this event to yield lots of new members; the structure of Circle is such that we partner with schools to carry out projects that they’ve deemed necessary to continue girls’ access to education in their area, but to do these projects we hold high impact fundraisers that require a lot of helpers.
By February, we were pleased with the turn out of the Activities Fair, held our first Info Session, and decided it was time to elect a council. We put out applications and received several thoughtful, dedicated, and promising responses to the questions we’d prompted the applicants with. We selected a Fundraising Chair (Chloe Zilkha), a Finance Chair (Bridget Stokdyk), and Project Development Chair (Lara Mikhail), and a Public Relations Chair (Amanda Cooper).
During the end of February and beginning of March, we held a handful of Council Meetings and planned a social fundraiser that raised over $1,500 for Circle’s current projects. We were thrilled and felt like nothing could stop us. But then, the pandemic hit, and our community-oriented, in person fundraiser-based club was in danger.
With so many Zoom meetings happening in those first few months of quarantine and so little for us to do with our General Body, we did not hold GB meetings. We worried about losing members and had no way of growing our presence on campus as a new club without established networks and without the power of marketing in PR done on campus. We struggled to retain members and stressed that the pandemic would reverse all of the hard work we had done to get the Chapter up and running. At some point this worry transformed into a sort of hungry motivation not to let the organization fail. We threw all of our effort behind Project Development, with each member of the Council playing a vital role in researching potential partners. Caterina and I met via Zoom with countless potential partners to gauge how well our interests and capacities aligned, in hopes that we would have something set up for the 2020-2021 academic year. Our efforts were not in vain; the organizations we spoke to were all thrilled at the idea of working with us, and loved the initiative we had taken even during the global pandemic. We prepared materials for the fall and began planning a virtual Panel on women’s education to take place the following year as well.
Fast forward to October 2020, and I can’t say I’m anything other than overjoyed at where Circle is as of right now. We joke with potential new members that we started this student group at the worst possible time, but some days I think the perseverance we exhibited in the face of so much chaos and adversity defined who we are as an organization. We currently have a chapter general body full of members eager to get more involved, our Council is still amazing, and we are in the final stages of selecting a project for the year with several viable options for partners. We are even beginning to see our panel on women’s education coming together and have aimed to hold that sometime during the beginning of 2021. I am beyond proud of the effort we have put into Circle and where it has gotten us, despite the obstacles that have stood in our path. And I’m even more excited about what is to come, because I know this organization is going to do incredible things that I am thrilled to be a part of.