Starting a SPEAR chapter means taking the initiative to bring the art of public speaking to your area. As a chapter leader, you'll have the opportunity to organize meetings, events, and activities that foster a supportive environment for people looking to improve their communication skills and find their true voice. You'll be the driving force behind creating a space where students can build confidence, develop public speaking abilities, and engage in meaningful discussions, while we’ll be with you every step of the way. Joining SPEAR’s network of chapters also means becoming part of a larger community passionate about effective communication and personal development!

1. Fill out the form in the Start a Chapter Page. We will respond to find a date when we are both free to meet.

2. Meet with us! We want to know more about how we can help you start your chapter.

That’s it! We’ll work with you to help you get your chapter started at your location along with anything else you might possibly need.

Ideally, we’d like for you to have some short-term and long-term goals. Short-term goals would be having meetings and keeping us updated on what’s going on with your chapter. Long-term goals would be things like finding nearby places to teach public speaking skills, recommending to members and/or participating in speech tournaments. These would require going beyond meetings at school, but we totally understand if you also want to have a chill chapter with just meetings designed to learn public speaking.

We’ll send you meeting plans and give you as much advice as you’d like. You can choose to follow our meeting plans, or also go in another direction you feel is better for your personal chapter. Meetings often involve practicing speaking in front of an audience, but occasionally also include discussions on pressing issues, where members can voice their opinions in a safe environment on topics that matter to them.

Just like public speaking, we want to start a chapter to be as easy as possible. We’ll give you meeting plans, and we’ll send out newsletters every other week. We’ll meet with you as much as you want. At the same time, our goal isn’t to micromanage you as you understand your chapter better than we do. We want to create a relaxed yet productive and collaborative environment with our chapter leaders.

That’s perfectly okay if you don’t have a ton of experience in public speaking. After all, we want to teach public speaking skills to people willing to learn! We’ll send you our curriculum along with activities you can do to improve. We will also work with you to teach the skills required to lead a chapter. Learning public speaking as a group with the rest of your chapter might be the way you want to run your chapter if you don’t personally have public speaking experience. Using our meeting plans, you can learn public speaking alongside your chapter’s members in a fostered safe space.

Email us at speakspearorg@gmail.com if you have any questions about anything at all!