Deepening your members’ commitment
Use your larger list of contacts to recruit new members through personal contact. Call people or organize a short visit with students who showed interest in your organization at club day, from tabling, or at an event or rally. Learn what their interests and skills are and find an easy and productive way for them to help with your group’s work.

The beginning of the school year is a good time to spend a Saturday or Sunday discussing the group’s vision and creating a strategic plan for the year. Set aside a large chunk of time (like six hours). Choose issues, assign responsibility for tasks and create a timeline. By being strategic and building internal community, your organization will achieve far more than most other clubs.

At different times during the year, you might want to organize training sessions to increase the skill level of your members. Your group specialists should spend an hour teaching everyone else how they write press releases, speak in front of crowds, handle your administrative bureaucracy, facilitate meetings, make sense of the group’s campaign, etc. Encourage new people to take on positions of responsibility.

Ultimately y’all need to get arrested and spend a couple nights in jail together, sit in your administration building, or go on long road-trips to SEAC National Council meetings and summer training sessions to really build up an earth-shaking commitment to your group and the movement.

One thing that will help develop capacity is to create paid work-study jobs doing activist work. If you can find someone who you can count as a supervisor (either a sympathetic professor or someone working in a friend non-profit organization), then you can set-up work study jobs where 75% (or more) of the wages will be paid by the government! If you donate a quarter of your wages back to SEAC, then it effectively costs the organization nothing to hire you – and you get an exciting and important job doing field organizing, writing a newsletter or whatever you were hired to do for your local, state, or regional SEAC network.