Growing Your Astronomy Club Part 2: Keep 'Em Coming Back
1. Create the position of New Member Steward 2. Conduct meetings that members want to attend 3. Provide a supportive learning environment for your members Tips on Diversifying your Club How the Night Sky Network can help Action Plan
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3.  Provide a Supportive Environment for Learning

Is the club environment a safe place to ask the most elementary of questions?  For less experienced members, it is essential that no question is treated as a “stupid question.” Respond to each question with a respectful answer. We all were beginners at one time. All of us went through a learning process -- often with other members to help us. Become a welcoming, respectful mentor.

“In our club, things run well and we sometimes forgot that a lot of our members -- maybe a third of the club -- don’t know much about astronomy and unless they’d come to us and say, ‘Hey, we’d like to learn about astronomy,’ we’d forget. So we wanted to organize something for them.”

Consider starting Special Interest Groups (SIG) for members who would like to learn more about astronomy (or sharing astronomy with the public), the night sky, and/or operating a telescope -- at the introductory level. Here are some ideas other clubs have used:

• Members can use the Night Sky Network Toolkits & Videos, Sharing the Universe Videos, and other Night Sky Network resources as the basis for each astronomy-learning SIG meeting.  Your Outreach Coordinator or other experienced member might be interested in leading such a group in order to encourage more participation in your outreach events.

• Request two or three experienced members to help the new telescope owners learn about their telescopes.  

• To avoid adding an extra trip in order to attend, consider holding SIG meetings just before (or after) the general meeting and/or at your observing nights.

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Sharing the Universe videos are produced by the Astronomical Society of the Pacific (ASP) from research conducted by the Institute for Learning Innovation, the ASP, and from astronomy clubs like yours. www.astrosociety.org/SharingTheUniverse

 

The Sharing the Universe project is funded by the National Science Foundation and is supported by the Division of Research on Learning in Formal and Informal Settings (DRL) of the National Science Foundation under Grant Number DRL 0638873. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in the material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

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Video production by Flying Moose Pictures