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Lidia Rios

Club President, Gerardo Flores, explains to students who want to expand their knowledge of cultures, especially those chosen as the topic in the meetings. With the music and fashion in today’s society. “I want to help students be able to have an outlet, to be able to reach the community and express who they are,” Flores said, “So come join today!”

Conceived from the minds of six seniors, C.R.E.A.T.E (Creativity relates everything and teaches everyone) brings a new spunk to the table at Downey High School. C.R.E.A.T.E club offers help in poetry, literature, photography and film, and of course music production, through culturally integrated topics, hoping to extend, not only the knowledge of thus subjects, but friendships along the way. C.R.E.A.T.E was originally meant to be a simple music production club, but the concept of teaching only one subject was not enough for the founders, so they made some changes.

“We didn’t want to limit ourselves [so] why not do literature and maybe art and photography and videography? That way we can appeal to more kids with more talents and so we ended up taking it in that direction,” Anthony Abdelsayed, club vice president said, “but we also wanted veer the learning part, so we decided on a system of culture affair topics.”

Club president, senior, Gerardo Flores was the brains for the engineering of C.R.E.A.T.E club, as he wanted a way for students to have an outlet to reach, not only other students, but the community as a whole. Alongside Flores, the remainder of his board members and founders decided they wanted to incorporate culture in their teachings, so they decided on a system where meetings address new cultures and cover how that culture is represented or seen in modern times through music, poetry, film, etc.

“I thought this club was really cool,” board member, Mary Hernandez said. “It connected the elements of different cultures and I did literature because I love literature. It drew the different cultures into the literature we have today.”

The club’s first meeting was held on Thursday, October 1. The new club members were spread out in three different rooms; one room was held for teaching literature and poetry, the second room was for film and photography and the last room was held for teaching music production.

“I did music on my laptop, and I was just really into Justin Bieber and how he got famous off of YouTube and the chances of that. My dream is to make it big one day and the chances of that are very very slim,” Flores said, “so what I thought of was what can I do to reach the public? You know I’m only seventeen and the only thing I could’ve thought of was school; school can help reach out to the public.”

C.R.E.A.T.E was established to be able to give students an opportunity to broaden and express what they know about art as well as a chance to be noticed in the community.

“Some people would make fun of us, from where we gained some inspiration, but I love Kanye and look at all he has done,” Flores said. “ I mean we have a club in school you know; we are trying to make it as big as possible.”

C.R.E.A.T.E club was originally going to be named C.H.E which stood for to create, to be heard, and to express. Board member, Robert Molina opted more towards an acronym that stood for what they wanted to convey, resulting in C.R.E.A.T.E.