Anime Club has done months of fundraising and volunteering in order to make their dream a reality and will attend Kansas City’s annual Naka-kon during spring break.

Naka-kon is the annual trip that Anime Club fundraises every year to attend in order to allow club members to experience something nearly all anime, manga and comic fans come together for.

“Naka-Kon is basically this convention, and they have all this stuff from Japan,” club president Anna Mackay, junior, said. “They have a bunch of Japanese manga artists, they have people in to talk about drawing in general. They have Japanese voice actors that come in to talk about the basics of voice acting… and then you have the vendors that sell a bunch of things that could be fun to buy.”

The event this year will be hosting cosplay contests, fan panels, famous voice actors such as Ian Sinclair and Mary Elizabeth McGlynn, and musical artists as well. However, achieving the goal of being able to make the trip possible required a lot of fundraising.

“For fundraising, we tend to do coffee and tea sales from The Giving Bean, and teachers like that so it is very simple for us to fundraise,” vice president Evelyn Guo, junior, said. “As for [Naka-kon] tickets, the students have to purchase the tickets themselves.”

The event, Friday through Sunday, will be packed with cosplayers, voice actors, comic fans and booth vendors, and Anime Club will be a part of all the fun. This is an opportunity for Anime Club members to run about, explore and socialize.

Anime Club has spent the year focusing on its fundraising events, but they can now kick back and appreciate their hard work by roaming about the conventions halls and rooms. Members will have opportunities to meet select voice actors, musical and visual artists, cosplayers, fans of various franchises, and more.

“This convention in Kansas City is humongous,” Guo said. “You get to interact with other people that you have never met on a regular basis.”

This will be the third year that Anime Club members will have an opportunity to visit Naka-kon. For a few members of the group, this convention is nothing new, but for others this is a brand new experience. Anime Club upperclassman hope that their underclassmen are able to find the trip to be enjoyable and worth remembering.

“There are different aspects of Naka-kon that will appeal to different kinds of crowds,” Mackay said. “It’s really mixed, so I feel like there is always something, at least one thing, that [someone] will enjoy, so they’ll be able to find that enjoyable.”