Key Club members last Thursday attended the Fall Rally in Kansas City. At the Fall Rally, Kansas Key Club members had the opportunity to listen to speakers, attend workshops, and help with service projects.

Junior Duru Dogan and senior Tejaswi Shrestha helped lead an officer training workshop, where club officers talked and found solutions to any problems within the club, though they felt overwhelmed running it.

“[The workshop was] a little overwhelming. I’ve never led a workshop before and I felt weird giving my peers advice on self-improvement as I’m still working on that myself. It was also kind of hard to keep everyone engaged for half an hour, but I feel like overall it went well. People responded to it positively,” Duru Dogan, Lieutenant Governor for the Kansas District Key Club said.

Members who weren’t running a workshop attended other workshops that taught them meaningful life skills and learned how Key Club will affect them going into college.

“Both of the workshops I attended were great. The first one was all about self-improvement so we were given a list of attributes and picked three strengths and weaknesses off of it that we thought we had, and then we talked about balancing them in our lives,” Mira Bhandari, Junior said. “I also went to one about scholarships and college which was really informative. They talked about a lot of different opportunities key club could give us resumé-wise.”

Students also found one of the event’s speakers, John Nguyen, Principal of Piper High School to have a powerful story.

“He told us about how his parents escaped from Vietnam in a small boat to pursue a better life in the states,” Shrestha, Secretary for the Kansas District Key Club, said. “He encouraged us to always take the best path, even if it’s the harder path.”

The service project that members completed included making blankets for a children’s hospital and writing cards for veterans and a nursing home. Owen Stuckwisch, a junior, found making the blankets to be his favorite part out of the event.

Students who went expressed that if you have the opportunity to go to the Fall Rally in the future you should go.

“Just go for it! Even if you don’t know anyone else going, Fall Rally is a great way to get to know the Key Clubbers in home club, in your area, and the organization in general,” Dogan said. “You get to see how your service impacts people beyond your school.”