Chapter Profile- Roosevelt @ City College of New York
External Engagement Coordinator Hannah Zhang met with chapter head Moustafa Elshaabiny to discuss some of the chapter’s highlights from the past year. Take a look at their conversation:
• How old is your chapter?
o The CCNY chapter is three years old, founded in the fall of 2011.
• How large is your chapter?
o 30–35 engaged members
• What does a typical chapter meeting look like? What do you focus on?
o An average chapter meeting is about 15–20 people, including the executive board. Usually, we have different agendas for different meetings. The general body meetings usually focus on policy in the fall and impact in the spring. In our first meeting, we discuss what Roosevelt is and how we use policy to achieve impact, since many members tend to be new. After that, we plan what we will do during the semester, introduce 10 Ideas, and kick off the semester from there. We also use trainings like the Think 2040 and stakeholder trainings. We have peer-editing workshops and invite our alumni to come back and join us.
• What does an impact project look like for your chapter?
o After seeing that a lot of the published policies don’t really get implemented, we decided to vote as a chapter on one or two major policies to focus on in the spring, putting the entire chapter’s support behind those projects.
• Tell me about an impact project your chapter is focusing on this year.
o This year, we had five policies published in 10 Ideas. We put these policies up for a vote, and the winner was a policy titled “Cognitive Enhancement Through Multilingualism: Better Preparing Our Students Through Incentivized Elementary Dual Language Immersion” by chapter member Josh Kemp. This policy was modeled on an education initiative in Utah including half-day English instruction and half-day instruction in a different language. Our impact project seeks to implement a similar program here in New York, and we’ve already started to reach out to stakeholders in Utah and New York.
• What does your membership look like?
o We have different people from all academic backgrounds, including lots of members from engineering and the sciences in addition to your average political science or humanities major.
• How do you recruit members? Specifically, how do you work to create a diverse membership?
o As an executive board, we are very conscious about the clubs and circles that we already belong in. It’s easy to recruit our friends and people we already know are interested in policy. That being said, at the beginning of this year, we looked at the groups we were already involved in, and decided to recruit beyond those groups. For us, the most effective recruiting tool was word of mouth—telling people about Roosevelt and what we do. This really brings a different type of member, not someone who is just here for the sake of being here, but people who really believe in our vision.
• What do you think is most effective in recruiting and retaining members?
o What I find most effective is telling personal stories and making connections. When people hear why we do what we do, they want to be involved.
• How do you communicate with your members? Email? Social Media?
o We use Facebook and email. We don’t have an official newsletter, but we use emails a lot. Emails are effective, but they bring the kinds of members who aren’t motivated and committed at the beginning, so we really try to use this kind of communication as a “first step” in recruiting. It’s up to personal connections to retain members, I think. We’re also big on publicity. Last year, we brought in a publicity person who was a film major. She made a plan for videos, photos, and flyers to promote our work. It’s been pretty successful from there. One of our effective practices with social media is posting photos of all our meetings and tagging members, which tends to spread posts on Facebook and make people aware of Roosevelt.
• What is unique about Roosevelt, compared to other groups on CCNY’s campus?
o A lot of members tell me that they find Roosevelt unique at CCNY because our meetings are much more structured and we actually have concrete projects in mind. They say that professionalism is really what makes us stand out as a campus group.
• Do you have social events outside of your meetings?
o Because CCNY is a commuter school, we don’t have as many organized social events on campus as other schools, but we’re a social group. We get together to eat or go out, or hang out at our apartments. In addition to that, we bond a lot through working together on a project and depending on each other.
• What was one of your favorite events this year?
o Definitely the policy workshop that we hosted in the fall with other local chapters. We worked really hard to create the sense of a Roosevelt network and show that we’re not just CCNY, but also other school from around the New York City area. CCNY members got to bond with students from other chapters, and the policy workshop was very helpful for members writing 10 Ideas pieces. It was a lot of work to put together, but I think it was the event that really kicked off the year in terms of cross-chapter collaboration.
External Engagement Coordinator 2014- NorthEast region
Learn more about their work through the Roosevelt @ CCNY website.
