Founders Abandon Rose Society

Lila E. Nieves-Lee ’13 had a vision for a new type of final club—a group that would be part social club and part philanthropic organization. But after spending a month and a half recruiting members, designing the club’s crest, and planning its first charity event, Nieves-Lee has decided that the Rose Society Philanthropic Club will not become Harvard’s sixth all-female final club this year.

Nieves-Lee said she hoped to create the club to help improve Harvard’s much-maligned social scene.

But this past week, leaders of the never-quite-formed Rose Society decided to halt the development of the final club.

“We had a meeting, we all discussed it, and it just wasn’t the right time,” Nieves-Lee said.

According to Nieves-Lee, the time commitment necessary to establish a club became too demanding for those involved. The combination of sophomore tutorials, job applications, and thesis work that comes with second semester meant that the women involved did not have enough time to focus on the club.

“It was really close to all of us. It was an idea that we all really wanted,” Nieves-Lee said. “[When you] realize that you can’t really do something or you can’t give it your all, more often than not you’d rather drop it than fail at it.”

Nieves-Lee came up with the idea for the club during last fall’s reading period. She recruited the help of two of her blockmates and later found seven other girls who shared her vision, she said.

The club’s founders had hoped that its charity work would have gone towards combating domestic violence. Nieves-Lee said her grandmother was a victim of domestic violence, and the issue was very relevant to women in the Boston area.

Before disbanding last week, the organizers had already created a website and official crest and begun searching for possible charities among women’s shelters in the Boston area. They also commissioned shirts with the club’s crest embroidered on the chest. Although the club no longer exists, Nieves-Lee said that the founders will “still be rocking our shirts.”

The monetary costs of starting a final club were not a contributing factor to the dissolution of the organization, said Nieves-Lee.

“The information that we learned and the experience that we got from just trying is worth far more than having never done it at all,” she said.

Tara D. Venkatraman ’11, who is part of an unnamed anti-final club campaign, said that she saw the attempt to create a new final club as a sign that people are searching for more social options.

“A lot of people on this campus think there’s kind of a crisis with social life at Harvard,” Venkatraman said. “And a lot of people on this campus are trying to think about different ways to address that.”

—Staff writer Hana N. Rouse can be reached at hrouse@college.harvard.edu