Cabrini University is a home for all those who enter - it is a safe space, and a haven for all of the students who attend. Cabrini makes its students a priority. This includes in all extracurricular activities.
As it stands, Cabrini University offers over fifty student-run and organized clubs and organizations that center around a variety of things. They offer clubs for almost everything: the Anime Club, for example, and the Bowling Club, and the Black Student Union. The many clubs that Cabrini offers span so many interests, both niche and popular, and it provides a unique experience for the students who attend. However, sometimes, there is a lack of something a certain student is looking for - which is why it’s lucky that it’s so easy for a student to start their own club.
When I arrived, I was already loving my Cabrini experience. It already felt like home to me, and I was having such a good time already, even in the first semester of my freshman year. However, I was refraining from being in any extracurricular activities, not because I didn’t want to, but because they didn’t have the club I was really looking forward to. Currently, I’m a Creative Writing major with a Gender and Body Studies minor, so it’s clear that certain aspects of humanity, such as gender, body, and sexuality, are important and interesting to me. I’m also a member of the LGBTQ+ community, placing even more importance on it. However, when I went searching for Spectrum, the LGBTQ+ and ally club that I was looking forward to, I discovered that it was disbanded. However, after half a year spent trying to find the remnants of the club members and enter a group that already existed, I realized that it was a moot point, and I decided to build the club from the ground up.
My sophomore year of college, I decided that it was time to take the reigns and recreate the club that I wanted (and needed) so desperately. Many of my friends are also LGBTQ+, and they agreed to be the board and the club members I needed to move forward: we were already at an acceptable amount of members and knew that our membership would only grow as time went on.
The application process was incredibly easy, and the faculty and staff involved helped us every step of the way in making our dreams a reality. Our faculty moderator and the staff in the SEaL office were incredibly helpful as we navigated, for the first time, instituting a new club. We solidified our board, got enough club members to register, created social media accounts, and got ourselves up and off the ground.
The SEaL office helped us get our room booked for meetings, our name on the school-sanctioned list of clubs, and we were even invited to be a part of the Cabrini involvement fair. By my second semester, the club was actually well-instituted, and it was due to a huge involvement on Cabrini’s part that it was. Not only was the application process incredibly easy to navigate, but we had a huge amount of help from Cabrini staff members along the way, especially our faculty advisor and the head of the diversity office. With their instruction and approval, we were also able to hold many exciting events, including LGBT+ Bingo and our most recent board meeting with the faculty and staff of Cabrini University at large in order to cover more broadly LGBTQ+ topics.
Building a club from the ground up and then running it is never easy. It requires a lot of patience, organization, and teamwork in order to successfully establish a new club. However, because Cabrini is such a welcoming and safe space for its students, there are always people there to help you along your journey. At Cabrini, there’s nothing you have to do alone.