Re: [Organizers] University contra clubs

I have worked with a few university groups in some capacity. At Appalachian State University in NC, they have a campus events group that put on a techno contra event a few years ago in partnership with the group that would normally put on contra dances. The normal group is Appalachian Heritage Council, but apparently techno was pushing the definition of Appalachian Heritage a bit too far (contra is not native to the Southern Appalachians to begin with....) Maybe something like that would work at McGill if no new groups can be formed. Besides that, I shared advice writing the club constitution at Salem College and helped put on some events at Guilford College. The main thing I have seen is that having someone on campus promoting events and possibly putting on workshops is extremely helpful. Guilford College is small, but they have a newsletter that goes out with upcoming events and they were consistently able to get 60-80 students at an on-campus dance with a student body not much over 1000. Salem College is also pretty small, but a couple of students made it happen. One would knock on doors the evening of the dance to ask people to come, and another gave workshops for students using a copy of David Kaynor's Contra Dance Calling for Beginners by Beginners. Those workshops helped give the students the confidence to come to an evening dance where they would have otherwise felt ill-prepared and not come. Whatever you can do to make things as smooth as possible is helpful. At Salem College, they didn't have a budget to start out, so we were able to put together an open band donating its time, borrow a sound system from the local contra dance group, and the students sold stuff to raise funds for the caller. At Guilford College, we helped line up bands and brought a sound system once because the one they normally use had already been reserved. Also, from an approachability standpoint, I have found that it works best when it's primarily set up as an event for students as opposed to looking like an event on campus where an outside group is just using the space. Peter On Mon, Jun 20, 2016 at 1:34 PM, Marie-Michèle Fournier <organizers(a)lists.sharedweight.net> wrote: