ArtReach has been an established club for over two years, its club members keeping it lively. One tradition initiated by the last year’s officer team was the schoolwide art competition. At the time, the competition’s theme was the students’ interpretation of the future This year, ArtReach members intending to make this competition more successful broadcasted the event during school announcements, announcing the theme would be what makes students happy. Despite the announcements and school email notifications, the number of submissions for the art competition was fewer, at approximately 30 submissions in comparison to last year’s 80 participants.

ArtReach secretary and sophomore Annie Chen believes a possible reason for the decline in participants is due to a lack of advertising. To improve this, Chen believes that the email list should be updated so that members should receive more emails about daily bulletins and when meetings are.

Advertising and public relations has been a consistent issue that ArtReach has faced. As a smaller club in terms of both members and presence, the main goal has consistently revolved around getting more members and expanding the club.

ArtReach club member and senior Keerthi Pushparaj has noticed this decline in interest towards the club and believes that the club needs to change how they communicate to members.

“I hope they have more regular meetings, but other than that, the stuff that we do in the club is fun, and so I don’t think they should change anything about that,” Pushparaj said. “I believe it’s just a lack of communication, like I don’t receive any emails from them, or if I do is very irregular. And when I do hear about meetings [it] is from the announcements, which I never pay attention to anyways.”

One way ArtReach has encouraged members to come to its meetings by offering food. In past years, ArtReach officers brought in free pizza for members during the meeting in order to attract more members to do art. This year, however, meetings have focused more on creating art for donation.

“Food always works, so if you give something for free people are definitely going to participate in it,” Pushparaj said. “ So I think just the fact that the club is relatively lesser known. So having a food incentive, definitely makes it more well known. And then once there are more members, I don’t think they’ll be asking [what it is].”

Currently, the majority of the strikes ArtReach has received have been due to club meetings not being recorded or a lack of club meetings. Thus, aside from the art competition, ArtReach is looking into more avenues for club activities.

“One of our meetings in the beginning of the semester was making art for schools and I think Bangalore, India, which is basically an underprivileged area, where they have remained revamping of schools going on,” Chen said. “So we’ve had a member meeting for people [to be] in groups, and creating artwork for them so that we could send it to the internet. So we’re currently looking for more opportunities like that.”

While Chen remains hopeful for the future of ArtReach, co-president and senior Manasa Ganesh believes that the club is now on its last legs.

“The officer team itself is really problematic currently,” Ganesh said. “We’re all so busy and since [we’re] mostly seniors we’re really busy with college stuff right now, at least for me, like personally.”

Earlier in the year, the club was facing closure due to last year’s officer team neglecting to submit the paperwork for the club. This led to a late start for ArtReach and some complications with its initial meetings.

“I cared enough to revive it because the club meant a lot to me personally,” Ganesh said. “But I don’t know if there are any underclassmen or juniors who actually care about this club as much as I did.”