CNH District Convention

March 13-15, 2015. A magical weekend when I had the chance to witness 2800 Key Clubbers congregate at the Anaheim Convention Center to celebrate a year of service, family, and leadership together by screaming and cheering our lungs out. Key Club is an amazing organization I fell in love with between 9th and 10th grade but at first, I only fell in love with the service. I fell in love with Project Clean because to me, cleaning up the environment that we live in was so necessary - especially when I realized that our parks and our communities weren't well taken care of in the first place, as evidenced by the Cheerios I found in the mini lake at Heritage Park. I fell in love with the idea of putting a smile on someone else's face through the efforts that we made in the mere confines of our school. Then when we went to the nursing homes, the food banks, or the churches themselves and saw our impact firsthand? The experience is unbelievably surreal and rewarding. But it wasn't until 10th-11th grade that I began to fall in love with the spirit and the energy that Key Club showed each and every day. Cheering for our LTG and winning the spirit stick at Fall Rally was unimaginable. Unless you experience it for yourself, you'll never know the wash of emotion that you feel when you hear and participate in the energetic, loud screams and neverending claps while other Key Clubbers next to you engage in our famous Key Club cheer. You feel no shame: only love and passion. Who cares if strangers judge you? We know that we are celebrating something truly life changing.

DCON was absolutely amazing. As I saw each person adorned in spirit attire and getting ready for a night of screaming and celebrating, it was crazy to think that I was part of such an organization: an organization in which ohana is everything, where caring is "our way of life". In a world full of contempt and shaming, we need empathy and caring to continue to love our world and to love what we do. It's so easy to get caught up in the negative feelings and the self deprecating thoughts, but Key Club prevents all that. I can never feel upset or depressed when I go to a cabinet meeting or a general meeting because I know that our time in Key Club is meant to make others smile and how can we do that if we don't have a smile on our faces? DCON was truly an emphasis of Key Club's pure and genuine mission. Each award, each video, and each speech demonstrated the ripple effect that Key Club partakes in each and every day through each of its members internationally. As my eardrums were on the verge of bursting, I realized that Key Club was something to be proud of and to be cherished in my high school experience - as I saw each person tear up at the end of the 3 days, I couldn't help but shed a tear myself as I saw the impact that we had made and the impact that Key Club had made in our lives.

I am proud to be a Key Clubber and no matter what happens, nothing can change that. People can say that Key Club is "overrated" or that it's "stupid, have you heard their cheer?" - they don't know what Key Club is really worth. They don't understand that Key Club has the ability to move nations of people and to change the world one step at a time for the better. We are not to be taken lightly because we have a passion and a drive that can surpass any negative force that comes at us.