Two of MVHS’s most popular clubs join forces to provide adequate events for members.

There are nearly 100 campus-based, student-run clubs at MVHS, with new clubs passing every school year. While some are centered around community service and volunteering events, others explore business, sciences, sports, languages and art. Occasionally, clubs attempt to connect aspects of typical MVHS clubs to create a multi-faceted organization that offers a wide variety of activities to interested students. However, with that, clubs can bite off more than they can chew.

DECA is one of MVHS’s largest clubs, renowned for its business events and competitions. Students often overlook the fact that DECA offers volunteering events. Because of this, DECA has recently struggled to find enough interested members to fill their volunteer ship events, so recently, they reached out to fellow on-campus club Octagon — one of MVHS’s largest community service organizations — for help.

DECA and Octagon are partnering to form “Decagon” to ease some of the difficulty DECA experiences running a club with over 600 members. It is not a separate club, but rather a branch that is part of both organizations.

“[DECA] initially started [community service events] because we had city officials asking for volunteers,” said junior Ani Kunaparaju, a DECA vice president. “But we’re a business club, and we don’t really do volunteering as much, but we didn’t want to turn them down.”

“DECA ran into the difficulty of having such a large club,” Octagon co-president senior Dhruhin Kurli said. “They’re reaching the point that they’re above 600 members, and we feel it too because we have over 300 members. There’s so many activities to manage, especially with DECA because of their competitions. That volume is difficult for any club to handle.”

Decagon takes DECA’s volunteering division and hands it to Octagon. DECA and Octagon will still remain separate clubs, but all DECA members interested in volunteering events will also join Octagon so that their hours can be kept on the Octagon database.

“DECA’s volunteering events are usually Cupertino Rotary events,” senior Kushal Pradhan said, another Octagon co-president. “The fact is, sometimes they have difficulty filling their events, and since [Octagon] is pretty good at that since we’re dedicated to volunteering specifically, by handling that we help DECA out. [The partnership] also helps out Octagon’s members by having more events available to them.”

Octagon is essentially taking weight off of DECA’s shoulders, as they no longer have to worry about collecting enough volunteers for community service events.

“We don’t have the same amount of members [looking for community service events] as Octagon,” said Kunaparaju. “[Octagon] needs events. We have events, but we don’t have enough people. Essentially, DECA is going to have the events and Octagon will bring the people.”

For now, Kurli, Pradhan and Kunaparaju are calling this new partnership “Decagon.” This evolving collaboration between two of MVHS’s largest and most popular clubs is paving the way for more on-campus clubs to develop partnerships in the future.