As a club, National Art Honor Society was barely functioning when I first arrived. All of the members had graduated except for two, and neither of them had any interest in taking control. I joined on a whim because I enjoyed the teacher that ran the organization and she told me I should look into it. I could have easily left after that first meeting, but I decided to come back to a couple more meetings. There were 20 of us who didn’t know what we were doing. My teacher said we needed someone to become president or the club would not be able to continue for the school year. No one volunteered for the position except me. I took over planning our meetings, projects and fundraisers. I was spending almost every afternoon in my teacher’s classroom working for the club. It would have been considerably easier if I had let the club fail, but I had made a promise to stay committed. Commitment and community are extremely important to me. I feel like I created a family within that community, and the 20 of us grew in ways that I had never imagined. We learned to embrace each other’s personalities, even if they were different from our own. Those of us with higher GPA’s began to tutor those of us with lower ones so that they would meet the requirements for the club. At the end of the year, we were all able to graduate with the rainbow cords from NAHS and with a presidential pin. My decision to stay with the club and my decision to volunteer as president had proven that commitment and a sense of community can lead to amazing things in life.
