Registering a University Group

Writing a Constitution

Universities generally require student groups seeking recognition (in order to use the school name, receive funding, etc.) to submit a formal constitution. This is meant to give long-term structure to the group by formally specifying its purpose, leadership, scope, and decision-making process. However, it can be difficult to write a formal constitution if you’re just getting started because you don’t really know how your group will function yet. We recommend when starting out not to worry too much about a constitution that’s good—just submit something that fits the school’s requirements. It’s perfectly valid to come back and change it later.

You’ll need to find your school’s requirements. Most schools publish their own unique list of requirements that submitted constitutions must fulfil. This can generally be found online on the website of the Student Union, or whatever part of the university administers clubs. (The fastest way to find them is generally to Google “[university name] student group constitution”). Rethink Charity's Local Effective Altruism Network (LEAN) has written an example constitution below, which hopefully can be quickly edited to align it with your institution’s requirements.

The requirements list will generally specify some of these three things:

• A required format – for example, Article 1: Name, Article 2: Statement of Purpose, etc.

• Information that is required to be in these articles. We’ve tried to make our sample articles below fairly inclusive; however, there will inevitably be requirements our example does not cover. Go ahead and write these out yourself.

• Required passages – for example, UC Berkeley requires all groups to state that “We will not haze according to California State Law.” Required passages can be copied and pasted from the requirements list onto the constitution in the appropriate place.

If your school doesn’t have any specific requirements for constitutions, that’s great news! You can just copy and paste the sample constitution, provided below, and submit it.

Sample Constitution

We’ve written a sample constitution as an example of the style and substance many universities desire. This will probably not fulfil your institution’s requirements; but it is a good place to start. This is just an example; if you wish to write your own constitution, go for it!

Note: If you encounter a professor who is:

• Excited about learning more about effective altruism

• Proactively and positively sharing effective altruism resources in their class (e.g. mentioning the 80,000 Hours podcast, or recommending EA books or content)

• Or is interested in answering research questions that you see frequently discussed with effective altruism

Please email Catherine Low from CEA’s groups team (catherine@centreforeffectivealtruism.org), sharing a brief description of the professor, their background, their level of familiarity / interest in effective altruism. This could be a particularly valuable connection if the professor is at the top of their academic field. The CEA groups team will share the information with community members specializing in building the Global Priorities Research Field. Their ability to connect may depend on capacity.

Utilising the Student Union

Get a copy of any booklet that the Student Union produces for clubs.

Find out what resources are available to you, for instance:

• Rooms to meet in

• Tables and chairs for publicity events

• AV equipment

• Printing and copying

• Permanent email address for your group

See if there are any events and/or awareness-raising weeks organised by Student Affairs, which you might be able to partner with (e.g. One World Week, RAG week). You may be able to get free publicity and resources through these.

Find out if there is a contact list for other groups. Get in touch with like-minded groups and check their meeting and event times. You may want to attend events to meet people and casually recruit members, or you may want to team up with them for certain activities and events.

Check what sources of funding/grants are available for student groups.

Eventually, you may want to check if there are any committees on which it would be useful for your group to have input (e.g. campaigns, student activities, clubs and societies, or any that determine the distribution of funds), and consider encouraging members of your group to run for election to them.

Clubs Fair

Your university’s clubs fair (also called Freshers’ Fair, Activities Fair and Orientation) is probably the best opportunity you’ll have all year to attract members. Some universities have them at the start of each academic year, and some hold them at the start of each intake, often two times a year.

Here is a guide to make the most of clubs fairs and other tabling opportunities. This guide is mostly designed for clubs who have several people to help with the time to organise. You may wish to scale back some or all of these suggestions if you have less capacity.