While most students at Westview were packing up their books, preparing to leave school for the day, Liahnne Kym Ico (11) and Priscilla Liu (11) were unpacking. They stood to the right of the school library organizing their trinkets on a fold-out table. 

In November 2019, Ico and Liu formed Charitable Trinkets, a club that handcrafts jewelry, such as rings and necklaces, and donates their proceeds to the San Diego Food Bank. 

“We chose to donate to the San Diego Food Bank because it’s local to us and our community,” Liu said. “We were searching for an organization that ASB’s donation policies aligned with.”

To Ico and Liu, arts and crafts was a hobby for them to exercise their creativity. In elementary school, Ico was introduced to jewelry making by her cousins. She also bonded with her older sister through learning how to make different patterns on friendship bracelets.

“In middle school, I would make friendship bracelets and give them out to my friends to show my appreciation for them,” Ico said. “It was something that I could make and something that they enjoyed receiving. It showed my sincerity for them, because each craft took me around two hours and it wasn’t something I could just buy from a store.”

As early as Kindergarten, Liu began crafting jewelry with friends. During church meetings when she was younger, Liu would make friendship bracelets.

“For me, friendship bracelets were the gateway between crafts I did when I was little and more sophisticated jewelry,” Liu said.

Because Ico and Liu wanted to share their love for trinket making, it seemed natural for the duo to start a club.

In previous years, club rush was a vital opportunity for a new club to recruit members and gain attention, but with the school’s online learning last year, there was no club rush.

“It was hard to get the word out because we couldn’t post flyers,” Ico said. “So when we started through Zoom, we mainly got people to sign up for our club by asking our friends.”

Despite not having the same opportunities to advertise as they would have in a regular school year, Ico and Liu held weekly Zoom meetings on Tuesdays after school to make trinkets.

“Our progress was definitely really slow in the beginning,” Liu said. “It was more inconvenient meeting with people [outside their classes] because students already had to go on Zoom for school, so many people didn’t want to go on another Zoom call for a club.”

Regardless of their small size, Ico and Liu committed to the development of their club. They created presentations with detailed photographs and instructions, prepared craft materials for their members to pick up at their convenience, and created icebreakers for students to get to know one another. 

By the time Westview transitioned back to in-person learning this school year, Charitable Trinkets was prepared to expand their club.

“Our member sign-ups really picked up when we went to freshman orientation,” Ico said. “We made a club trifold and handed out flyers and almost everyone in our club right now found out that way.”

Now, Charitable Trinkets consistently has 20 regular attendees during meetings with more than 200 members on their mailing list. Every few months, their club sets up a booth left of the library after school to sell their jewelry.

“We were just planning to sell enough to make up for the price of purchasing the supplies that we bought, which was around $40, but during our three consecutive sell days, we made $80 from sales and donations,” Ico said. “It was a really nice surprise and we were in awe of people’s generosity.”

On Aug. 26, they hosted their club’s first sell day while students were all in-person. That day, their club made $170, more than double their sell day the previous year. 

“We were definitely super nervous and a lot more people came to our table than we expected,” Ico said. “At some points there were so many people around us that we would get kind of flustered. But in the end, we were proud of our hard work. We didn’t expect to sell out but we sold out on our first sales day.”

Since then, Charitable Trinkets has had two more sell days, with more days planned for the future. To date, the club has raised $500 for the San Diego Food Bank.

In the future, Charitable Trinkets hopes to create a larger variety of trinkets to appeal to a larger audience.

“I don’t think either of us expected our club to gain the popularity our club has received up to now,” Ico said. “What started out as a way to express our passions has taken shape into a club we are both extremely passionate about now.’’