Masuk Free Press

Interact Club has been quietly aiding countless organizations for years. The club is centered around volunteering and provides opportunities for members to engage in community service. 

“Interact was a club started thirty to forty years ago. It’s a branch of the local Monroe Rotary,” said Lauren Iverson, advisor of Interact. “Every town has a rotary group, sometimes they’re called something different. Rotary is one of the largest community service organizations in the world, it’s international. Our local chapter has won awards for their work and for their donations”

At most events that take place in Monroe, you can find Rotary behind the scenes, and oftentimes the Interact club as well. Rotary has partnered with Interact on countless occasions, even giving out monthly awards to club members.

“Rotary sponsors this club, they started it years ago with Mr. Schwarz, who is now principal of STEM. He was one of the first advisors for this program, and there have been other advisors that are in our building, like Mr. Joel Castillo. Mrs. Pagel had it right before me,” said Iverson. She has been advising Interact for four years now.

“I’m supposed to guide students to come up with ideas for community service and carry them out,” said Iverson.

“It was a rough start when I first took over, because of Covid, we weren’t allowed to go places and volunteer. The year before, we used to go and clean up yards, go to the senior center, and go to a lot of places. We weren’t able to do that for a few years,” said Iverson. One of the main goals of Interact is helping out the community, and the club struggled when there was no available community to help.

“Now that we’re kind of beyond that, we’ve started to get back out into the town more, which is really great,” said Iverson. “We’re getting some more leadership roles, because when we had that happen, all we were doing was writing thank you cards from home, so student leadership didn’t get to see student leadership.”

“The last couple of years we’ve gotten some traction in this sense, so I am trying to release a lot of control and let students run their own activities,” said Iverson. The club now contains levels of officers who each have different roles. 

There are many different projects and events Interact has assisted with. One of the biggest last year was the Wolfe Park rock garden.

“The rock garden was my favorite event last year. We got to go to an elementary school and paint rocks with little kids. It was amazing to see how excited the kids were to get to paint their rocks, and even more excited to see them at Wolfe Park,” said two-year Interact member and this year’s secretary, Alex Cecchino. The rock garden is on display outside the playground at Wolfe Park, and the club is hoping to replenish it each year.  

Another big organization Interact aids is Think Pink Monroe, a nonprofit organization, who helps families in Monroe impacted by breast cancer.

“We help the Think Pink organization in Monroe by volunteering at their pink-out events, both at the football game and the kick-off event where they had a fair for kids,” said Iverson. 

The club also sold bracelets and merchandise for the program at school during lunch. Smaller things like this are still very crucial to the community and meaningful to the program.

“What I love about Interact is all the different opportunities that are given to us. Even though some of our projects are bigger than others, they are all still beneficial to our community,” said Cecchino.

All members of the club have equal access to these volunteer opportunities, and oftentimes provide their own.  

“We’ve had 3 people this year come up with their own ideas and have success with their projects. We had a student organize a beach cleanup, and someone else organized a walk for diabetes,” said Iverson. Interact is a great club for students to harness their creativity for a greater cause. 

Iverson commented that oftentimes, Interact members are leaders and participants in many other Masuk extracurriculars.

“They’re usually very busy students but they’re also very efficient and willing to give their time. They have very thoughtful ideas.”

Ultimately, the goal of Interact is to inspire students to take part in their community. 

“Their goal is to garner interests from others to join them and make a bigger impact than what they could do on their own,” said Iverson.

The volunteer hours that come with being a member are just an added plus.