The key to success

Out of more than 260,000 students participating in Key Club International around the world, only one is elected to be international president each year. To have one president from your school’s chapter is a big deal. To have three in the span of six years?

“Absolutely unheard of,” Homewood High alumnus and former Key Club International President Rip Livingston said.

Homewood High’s club has sent three seniors — Rebecca Riley in 2012-13, Livingston in 2015-16 and current senior William Sims — to the highest position in Key Club, a student-run service organization that is part of Kiwanis International.

All three students, who are lifelong Homewood residents, started in their school clubs and worked up through state and regional positions before being elected international president. Riley, now 22, graduated from Vanderbilt University and is studying particle physics at University of California – Irvine. Livingston, 20, is a sophomore at Stanford University.

Sims’ path to the role of international president, however, started a little earlier than his predecessors.

Sims’ father was in Key Club in high school, and his mother was a Key Club “sweetheart,” as the club was all-male at the time. His parents met through the club, and his father proposed at a club convention. 

“I was literally born into Key Club,” Sims said.

Sims’ father was also college roommates with Riley’s father, which is how she first ended up in the club as a freshman. The choice to move up in Key Club, however, was entirely her own. Due to the connection between their families, Sims was present when Riley was elected president, though he wasn’t a Key Club member at the time.

“When they called her name and everybody was cheering, I was standing next to her dad. And he looked at me and said, ‘That’s going to be you one day.’ He was the first person to officially call it,” Sims said.

Livingston was at the international convention the next year, when Riley presided over the event, and he said seeing her in that role was part of what motivated him to seek it himself.

Being international president is a serious honor. It’s also serious work.

“This is not something that just happens. We have each worked so, so hard,” Riley said.

Key Club is student-run in the truest sense of the word: the international president, vice president and regional trustees are all high school students who make decisions for the direction of the club and its service work for national charities — including UNICEF, Children’s Miracle Network and March of Dimes — as well as local chapters’ efforts.

“When you’re the level we were at, at the end as president, what it looks like is you’re communicating with senior March of Dimes leadership, senior UNICEF leadership … to communicate how you will facilitate the entire organization’s contributions to those organizations,” Livingston said.

That level of work can mean giving up a lot of other activities during their senior year. Riley recalls working on Key Club duties from the moment she came home from school until midnight, fitting in homework in the mornings and during her classes.

“It was just going all the time and trying to cram things into every single moment of the day,” Riley said.

From watching his two predecessors, Sims said he has already learned a lot about how to manage his time. He chose to quit the marching band and football team in order to focus more time on Key Club. In addition to their presidential workload, Riley said, they also try to keep their ties with the Homewood High chapter and its service work, including the Exceptional Foundation and Children’s Hospital.

“It’s more or less like having two full-time jobs,” Livingston said. “There’s a ton of sacrifices.”

They made those sacrifices because of the people they’ve met and the work they see Key Club do. Riley said it’s all the more impactful to know that students are behind all of it.

“The people that I met there [at my first convention] just have hearts of gold,” Riley said. “They cared about serving more than they cared about leading. That was something I admired so much and thought was so incredible. I wanted to be able to support that however I could. I saw that my talents could really be used in an administrative capacity and a leadership role.”

Livingston had the chance to visit clubs across the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean during his tenure as president. He said there was a surprising unity in what motivated each of the chapters.

“Seeing the common denominator in all those places of the organization and what it offers to people and means to people was really inspiring to me,” Livingston said. “The people in Barbados who are members of Key Club, they do it for the exact same reason as the people in the middle of Idaho.”

Sims entered his term as president with the perspective that his job is to make the Key Club experience enjoyable for every single chapter under his watch.

“I know that I have a direct impact in how people are changing communities worldwide,” Sims said.

And if he needs a helping hand, Sims has an advantage few other Key Club international presidents have had: two veterans from his own town.

“It’s really cool to have like a lot of international presidents come from one district alone, but for it to come from one high school is absolutely insane,” Sims said. “It’s a really big deal. Out of 276,000 people, you’re the one.”