Recently, NAHS Key Club went on a three day long trip to Sacramento for an event called CNH DCON 2024. This event had hundreds of people traveling from California, Nevada, and Hawaii to celebrate the end of the 2024 Key Club term. This was an incredible opportunity for NAHS Key Club to learn more about Key Club, meet new people, and have a great time over the weekend. One feature of the event was the awards ceremony for the accomplishments of the many Key Clubs from multiple schools.
This year at DCON, Northridge Academy High School Key Club accomplished so much. They earned awards of distinction for both their club as a whole and their members. NAHS earned distinguished club status. This means that among many, many other things like charity donations and community involvement, our school’s Key Club had an average of 60 hours per member, with a total of over 3,000 hours served to our community. Given how small our club is, having the lowest membership count in the San Fernando Valley, this was a very significant achievement and a proud accomplishment on behalf of our school.
Along with this our club also received the Club Video award. This was achieved in no small part because of the work done by Kyle Salvador. Kyle made his start in Key Club back in the spring semester of 2023. He was initially very weary of Key Club and didn’t think he would stay, only attending in the beginning for his friends. He started as the 23-24 term’s first new member and is one of our highest achievers being one of the very few in Los Angeles County, which encompasses the Region of Key Club our school belongs to, to achieve over 225 hours of service through Key Club. During his membership he started to create promotional videos for our club, these originally were little projects he kept to the side, but as he made more and more he self-taught skills through Adobe After Effects and was given his very own position in the club as head of the Video Committee. It was his work as head of this committee that created a minute-long winning submission to the CNH video contest that presented Key Club and its core values of service through a music video. This award was given solely to our club at DCON, which was a great honor as there are very few awards given to a single recipient. To show their gratitude, Kyle went on stage on behalf of his club (pictured) to be presented the award and will keep it as a reminder of his accomplishments in the future.
Additionally, NAHS Key Club’s members also received their own individual honors. Six students from Northridge Academy were a part of the 101 Key Clubers who earned platinum status out of 30,000 students across California, Nevada, and Hawaii. Receiving platinum honors is no easy task, it requires serving a minimum of 200 hours to even be considered, along with attending countless different additional events that Key Club offers outside of service. The students who received this award include Josiah Anderson, NAHS Key Club President 23-24; Pedro Hernandes, Vice President; Ashley Hilario, Tech Editor; Sean Hunt, NAHS Treasurer and Division 16 East Treasurer; Jayden Cunanan-Samaco, Key Club member; and Kyle Salvador, head of the NAHS Video Committee. These six students in a single year of Key Club demonstrated in their countless hours devoted to service the Core Values of Key Club international: leadership, character building, caring, and inclusiveness.
Since this club is so small with very limited resources, these students had to do a lot to plan out and make sure they qualify for this award at DCON. Every single month, they attended at least four to five community service events by partnering with food pantries, community organizations, dog adoption centers, and even Discovery Cube, through breaks, weekends, and school days. Using their knowledge they created training events for new members. Josiah, Pedro, and Sean each donated 100 dollars to the Pediatric Trauma Program out of their own pocket, which ended up improving their chances to be considered for platinum honors. The biggest reason that allowed them to achieve platinum is Tormenta De Cuernos, a scare maze that was co-directed by Sean Hunt and Josiah Anderson that was entirely run by Key Club volunteers from D16E and D16W across many high schools. For seven nights straight these students entirely ran this maze for charity up in Chatsworth.
To sum it all up, Northridge Academy High School Key Club did an exemplary job this year shown through all of their awards and accomplishments. Now that the term is over, they are moving on from Key Club and are passing the torch on to the juniors who will determine the future for what Key Club will accomplish next year. As for the seniors, they have earned their well deserved break and are moving on through life with their newfound leadership and civic skills and many even join other branches of Key Club such as Circle-K for College.
