Behind the Story: How a new club was formed entirely virtually

By Shelby Banks

Aaron Capinpin and I first started generating ideas for this story over Zoom since we’re both in our own hometowns at the moment. The day before, I had seen several posts on Instagram from a few of my friends promoting a new club called the Educators of Color club. It turned out that my roommate from my freshman year at Cal Poly, Cecilia Guzman, was actually the president of this new club, and she had just founded the club before our virtual quarter began. I responded to her Instagram story to ask more about the club. 

“How are you starting a new club when you can’t meet in person?” I asked her.

“Zoom,” she replied. 

I shared that interaction with Aaron, and he agreed it would make an interesting story. We started forming questions to ask and then we scheduled a Zoom interview with Guzman. For this story, I was in charge of the word, strategy and engagement components, while Aaron was in charge of audio, video and interactives. 

“I think that the process was not difficult,” Aaron said. “I’ve got some experience editing videos which made creating the video easier. As for interactive component 1 it was simple enough, we just had to acquire two photos and ask the right questions to get the captions. If there was a part where I found some difficulty it was in interactive component 2. With our topic, I struggled to find a good interactive medium to use, but eventually we decided to go with a sort of timeline flowchart. Once we figured out what to do, actually working on it was easier.”

Aaron decided that he really wanted to showcase Guzman’s dedication to the club through the use of video. He picked the quotes that he believed had the strongest emotion in them, which he then edited into the video alongside clips of Guzman running her meeting over Zoom. 

For the profile component, I wanted to highlight what makes this club unique, which is that it offers a space for students of color interested in a career in education to have access to resources they may not have known about on their own. I also wanted to highlight that the club has been successful so far in terms of communicating to its members, despite never meeting in person. 

“Honestly I think having it virtually kinda worked in our favor. In terms of communication, sending out flyers on all our social media helped us,” Guzman said. 

The most difficult part of writing this piece was prioritizing what should go in the Q&A. We had so many great quotes from Guzman, but not all of them were entirely relevant to the point of the story. After narrowing down her quotes, the piece became much more cohesive and more closely matches the other audio, video and interactive components that Aaron produced.