“My overall goal (of this club) is to have people be happy with what they can create and (help) expand people’s ideas to the fullest,” Benicio McNally, a Berkeley High School sophomore said, “With every single thing that someone talks about or comes up with, that just adds to the overall goal of working together with people to create things, collaborate and bring your thoughts to reality.” McNally is the co-founder and president of the BHS Innovation Club.
Students participating in this club have the opportunity to showcase their own creative ideas to a group of their open-minded peers. Students then bounce ideas, topics, references, and plans off of each other through in-depth conversations in an attempt to be able to create something meaningful and powerful. Currently, the Innovation Club is working on directing a mockumentary (fake documentary) to hopefully be showcased to BHS students later in the year.
“It’s a movie we want to make … and we really just started with a base of, ‘oh, I have a story,’ and then we talked about it and the more and more we talked about it, we started creating different scenes and it really just expanded,” McNally said, “All that freedom and the creativity you could do by making films, that’s why I wanted to start the club — it’s a place where you do that and you need a lot of different people’s input and to get that from students is just really valuable.”
McNally conveyed how a substantial motivation for the creation of the club came from recognizing how unacknowledged student perspectives are in terms of the creative process. “With the help of the people (in) the club, they can get recognized and get more seen by students.”
McNally, along with student member Simon Spinrad, a BHS sophomore, values the community aspect this club offers, serving as a safe space for anyone and everyone to express their creative ideas, perspectives, and stories. “The club is a place where we can talk about our creative ideas and be taken seriously, because at the end of the day, a lot of (other) places will not take us seriously,” Spinrad said, “We take each other seriously with our creative ideas, and our goal is to achieve the maximum potential of someone’s creative idea.”
Spinrad, one of the original creators of the mockumentary in the works, illustrated how the club offered a space for him and his creative ideas to be recognized, built on by other people, and appreciated, without judgment or criticism. “When I pitched (the idea) to the (Innovation) Club, it clicked for them. It felt really good for me because I had finally found people who saw the same potential in this idea that I had throughout the day,” Spinrad said, “We all just got almost head over heels over this idea, adding on to each other’s ideas until we’re script writing and trying as hard as we can to make it like a real production.”
Many club members share gratitude for the inviting community, freedom of expression, and for chance to get to know and connect with new people. Miles Rieger, a BHS sophomore and member of the club, appreciates it as an opportunity to manifest his individual creative ideas into something bigger and more meaningful, with the help and input of the club. “(It’s) a club for people to express their artistic side and come together to make a collaborative piece of work that uses diverse talents to make one piece for all of us,” Rieger said.
The Innovation Club features a non-judgmental, expressive, and friendly community space with room for all student-created ideas to grow and prosper through collaboration and creative talent.