Much Ado About Nothing: The World of Student-Led Debate Organizations

Great. You are chatting at a tournament or with a teammate, and you just got an idea. You are a debater or extemper or whatever speech and debate participant, now running into at least your second year of competition, and you are suddenly filled to the brim with ideas on how to be a — wait for it — changemaker. Yes, you! That is the word that first comes to mind when you consider the next level up in your speech and debate career. Trophies and high scores simply don’t satisfy you anymore. After all, you love this community, you’ve reaped the benefits, and now you feel it's your turn to give back. Yeah, “changemaker” is a really big word, but like your fellow crop of fast-talking, coffee-sipping, and ambitious student leaders, you feel ready to fill in those shoes. Be it responding to a persistent lack of specific resources or solving a problem you noticed, you got an idea for yet another student-led debate organization. To infinity and beyond! 

You may not know it yet, but there is a common trajectory. First, founders like you are really ecstatic to work on turning this to reality. You set up an Instagram page, go on Canva Free for a catchy logo and a cool original name. Maybe you even register a new Gmail account. Then, you get started with mission statement posts, elaborate slides on Instagram featuring the organization’s newly decided color palette and central ideas. Resources in Lincoln-Douglas for underfunded districts. Mental health advocacy in speech. A platform, a voice, all power to the people! You do well to recognize these niches where you seem to be very needed, and things pick up pace. Time to expand, because you can’t do this alone. You open Google Forms for applications, signing off each email with a proud “Executive President/Founder.” Positions and titles fly about, WhatsApp and Discord group chats pop up, and soon there’s some semblance of the change promised in the original idea you, the founder, had. 

But this isn’t really the end of student-led debate organizations, is it? Somehow, after this modest but perfectly good beginning stage, everything goes a bit static. Stagnant. You put in the work, make the content, spam-followed a bunch of people in the circuit to increase visibility. But somehow there’s no engagement. Barely anyone sees the work you created. Three bots liked this essay you submitted on hybrid teams. Are you really helping? 

Well of course you are. Changemakers have to start small. You post more often, coordinate more 2 a.m. group calls, fumble through the intricacies of teamwork and try out a new color scheme. Maybe at this point you even have a running website, featuring blogs, lectures, free coaching sessions. Whatever it was that your idea had initially set out to address gets a bit lost as you discover more and more gaps and holes in our little speech & debate community. Sure, your organization offers things — practice tournaments, coaching Zoom calls — all free of charge. But the people don’t seem to be in need. Few debaters follow your little organization, read your newsletter, and even fewer sign up for the events you meticulously planned and put your soul into. 

So doubt creeps in, as do schoolwork deadlines and life itself. You get busier, finding it more tiring than rewarding working on this organization that you’ve built, post by post. On your third color palette update, you wonder with frustration: was this all much ado about nothing? Why is the change not taking shape like I wished, planned, and envisioned it to? Where are the millions of fellow speech and debate kids that claimed they were in need, felt isolated, and left without support? Perhaps, this is the point where you and your organization kind of drift into a halt. You begin to cool off doing much at all, maybe a chunk of the people you recruited resign, and defeat stares back at you from the computer screen. Were you wrong, as a debater, to dare to dream of a better world? Were you foolish, in your quest to bring justice to your own niche world? The short answer is: no. Everyone who’s ever had an idea of starting a student-led organization probably had the correct intuition that there was in fact something wrong, and something they could do. What a lot of these once-promising organizations lacked, however, was clear strategy. 

Based on my experience freelancing from a multitude of student-led debate organizations, here are the commonalities between the successful ones who actually kept to their word of “change to stay.” Almost a page straight out of Econ 101, you have to know your purpose. 

First, consider the specificity of your idea. Is it specific enough that a group of high school students juggling life and more can sustain it? This is both in thematic terms and with scope. Starting with a narrower focus, addressing your more immediate and local needs may help you get things started. The launch for national expansion has never been easier with the age of social media, but you would have more impactful results if you were to start small but strong, on a familiar base. 

Second, consider the overlaps with existing organizations. To build your own ideas and be a founder is always great (and nice on a college CV), but bringing fresh ideas to existing organizations could really be a shortcut. Existing organizations have built up resources, connections, and following over the years—things you could utilize to spread your message. Maybe consider applying for a leadership position in somewhere established that aligns with your vision anyway, so this could be a winning partnership making both sides stronger. 

Third, even when setting out in creating your own organization, always remember you are a part of a larger community. Reach out to collaborate with fellow speech and debate organizations, exchanging ideas, helping each other. Debate often exemplifies this paradox: highly individualized competition rewarding personal excellence, yet completely reliant on teamwork to achieve aforementioned success. At the end of the day, other student-led debate organizations work towards the same goal of change as you do, so remember to see them as more than just rivals. 

To conclude, there is no one correct way or guarantee of success. On this long and winding path to changemaking, we can only attempt our best and hope it gets us somewhere. A perfect endpoint does not exist in this tedious, sometimes thankless process of making the world a better place. In choosing to even attempt this, I thank you for being rather noble and truly courageous. And that’s why in the speech and debate community, there will always be room for new ideas — yet another student-led speech and debate organization waiting to be.