The Power of Words club collaborated with non-profit organization, March for Our Lives Dallas, to write heartwarming letters to Uvalde victims on Nov. 17 during A and B lunch.

Power of Words is a club that writes letters and cards to people within the community. In the meetings, members are expected to write two cards in return for one volunteer service hour that National Honor Society students can use to help reach their hours of service for the semester.

Suhua Liu, junior and president of Power of Words, found that collaborating was more helpful than attempting to run a meeting alone.  

“I feel like it’ll be a lot easier to help each other out because we’ve [Power of Words] done literary activities like this before, so to collab and do one activity together lets more people show up and helps the meetings have an organized structure to reach the overall detailed goal at the end,” said Liu.

March For Our Lives is a student-led and non-profit organization that emphasizes the support of gun control legislation. March For Our Lives Dallas began in July of 2019 and is one of the many different chapters of the organization. 

Sarayu Bellary, junior and co-leader of March For Our Lives Dallas, was announced as co-leader in Oct. 2022. She hopes to continue to push the organization’s values of student activism through the clubs on campus. 

“Well, for us our main goal for our organization is to combat gun violence and to obviously spread awareness. We want to encourage students to use their voices, and so we thought that there’s no better way to do that than to write letters to Uvalde victims,” Bellary said.

Katie Chou, junior and co-leader of March For Our Lives Dallas, recognizes the importance that collaborations hold for new clubs. It allows both groups to reach students that they wouldn’t have seen otherwise.

“[Power of Words] is also a pretty well-established club, so it’s a good way to help new clubs, like us, to know how to kick off our club. It helps us have meetings with more and new members,” said Chou.

She believes that collaborations with other clubs not only helps her club obtain a wider audience, but it also is a learning experience for her and her club members. Officers and leaders can learn new techniques to conduct meetings that will keep members coming back.

“Our initial thoughts were that because new clubs are forming and Plano West is so big, it’s hard to get your voice out there and to be known by new students. People from well-established clubs, that are more mature, can guide us through the process of a club meeting,” said Chou.

Many clubs share a similar agenda regarding the activities that they do during their meetings. March for Our Lives and Power of Words both highlight how the significance of words and activism can make a change within the community.

“Power of Words is a club at our school that encourages students to use their voice and to get their words heard. So we thought, hey, we can both write stories to the Uvalde victims,” Bellary said.

Students can benefit from these collaboration meetings just as much as the club itself.

Using a club to make friends is a common practice when students want to branch out. It’s an easy opportunity for students to meet new friends, especially those that have a more difficult time doing so.

“At the end of the day, I go to these clubs to make new friends and find people that have similar interests as me, so it’s actually really comforting when we have collabs like this and I find 20 extra people that love to write and serve the community,” Chou said.