What It's Like to Start a New Chapter

December 18, 2023
Rachel Katoni

South Orange, New Jersey, United States

Class of 2025

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Since I started BBYO, I have always wanted to start a new chapter in the town I live in. As a freshman, I never knew what that meant. All I knew was that I wanted to make a difference in my home community. I spent tons of hours in a different town to better their community to the best of my ability. Then, this past September, the opportunity presented itself for me to start this new chapter. In June of this year, I was elected to Council Morah. I spent hours talking with staff about this town that needed a Jewish presence, and I knew BBYO was perfect. After the summer was over, I started reaching out to local temples and setting up meetings with their teen directors. Before I knew it, we were having multiple information sessions with tons of teens showing up. We started setting up a calendar of events and slowly started to run events. At every meeting, I started to bring up the leadership opportunities that BBYO has offered me and how it could do the same for them. We started talking about board position possibilities, and before I knew it, we had enough people for a full board! We successfully elected a full board for SoMa BBYO in the Greater Jersey Hudson River Region: Northern Council. In just a few short months, this chapter has become a thriving chapter. This experience has taught me so much about myself as a leader and the power that BBYO has to affect teens positively all over the world.

Rachel Katoni is a BBG from Koach BBG #932, Greater Jersey Hudson River Region #22, and loves Chipotle.

All views expressed on content written for The Shofar represent the opinions and thoughts of the individual authors. The author biography represents the author at the time in which they were in BBYO.

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