Setting up an official AID chapter on your campus gives you access to a number of chapter resources. It also ensures that your organizing efforts locally are connected with a nationwide effort. This helps to maximize the impact of your work, both by equipping you with key organizing resources and by connecting your work to a broader nationwide network that is more than the sum of its parts.

Even if you are already involved with an organization on your campus with a similar mission to AID, we believe there are five important reasons for you to set up an official AID chapter:

• AID Chapters Are Sustainable. Student organizations are difficult to sustain because students are always on the move -- and every four (or five) years they graduate! AID recognizes the constant flux of student life and so has created specific resources to help ensure that once a chapter is set up on campus, it stays on that campus. The biggest way that AID ensures chapter sustainability is by hosting more than 40 leadership summits in nearly every state across America each year to engage student leaders at more than 500 universities in its mission. AID is constantly using these summits as a way to train new leaders for its campus chapters. In addition to helping ensure a steady stream of chapter leaders, AID also has an array of resources to support its chapters (click here). Perhaps most important, AID has a permanent and friendly staff that is always on call to answer the questions of new chapter officers. This means that when you set up an AID chapter, you are creating a sustainable network on your campus to bring the world home.
• AID Chapters Support International NGOs and Campaigns. AID is a partner to a number of international organizations and non-partisan campaigns that seek to promote a principled and collaborative U.S. role in the world. For example, AID is a partner to the ONE Campaign, which seeks to raise U.S. development assistance. As an AID chapter, you become a part of our network, which itself is a partner to these broader campaigns. Thus, when you establish an AID chapter, you connect your campus to these NGOs and to broader international efforts such as the ONE Campaign.
• AID Chapters Represent and Empower a Nationwide Student Movement. AID’s founders recognized that our generation was the first truly global generation. Young people today are studying abroad in record numbers, connecting with peers around the globe via internet, and more likely to join Peace Corps and other international service programs than ever before. AID was started with the special mission of harnessing the energy and global insight of this interconnected generation to “bring the world home” to our fellow Americans. One of the most important outcomes AID hopes to achieve is to show students who believe in a collaborative U.S. role in the world that they are part of an vast and growing network of young Americans who seek to bring the world home. We think it is empowering for students to realize that while they are holding an event in their community, fellow students in their same network with their same passion for raising global awareness are hosting similar events in their communities. We currently have chapters from Virginia Commonwealth University to Yale to the University of Nebraska to San Francisco State University and we believe this diverse, nationwide network of chapters helps to symbolize that our organization is mobilizing a truly nationwide, generational movement.
• AID Offers an Innovative Approach to Student Engagement. AID’s approach to student activism is specially tailored to mobilize today’s student generation. Today’s successful student efforts are more focused on smaller, community-based movements that are specifically tailored to students’ interests and passions. AID’s approach to student activism moves alongside this generational trend. AID offers initiatives on a wide range of issues to fit students’ specific interests and it focuses on how they can take positive action on that issue through education and action in their own local community. At the same time, AID works to connect these community-based efforts together to ensure that it has a national impact. Click here to read more about AID’s unique approach to student engagement.
• AID Chapters Are Linked into a Broader Regional Network. AID events take place across every region in our country and on hundreds of college campuses. If you establish a chapter on your university, you will be able to link up with other events, students and opportunities in your region – which opens up great opportunities when it comes to finding speakers, doing publicity and building your own network locally. You’ll also be able to work with AID’s excellent Regional Directors, who are regularly setting up speaking tours and conference opportunities for AID chapters in their areas.

Given the reasons above, especially sustainability, we think it is very important to invest in formal AID chapters. We hope this explains why we believe that it is so important for our initiatives to be hosted by AID chapters. Of course, we welcome you having your events cosponsored by as many groups on campus as possible, but we also hope that your events will have a formal AID chapter as a sponsor of the event.

Find out about the resources AID provides chapters.

Learn how to set up an AID chapter on your campus.

Get started by downloading our Chapter Setup Guide.

Find out if there’s already an AID chapter on your campus.