Picture this: you have just started your own club, and you have a million questions running through your head. How will you get funding and connections? Who do you ask for help? Where will your club meet?

The Brookline Teen Center offers solutions to all of these doubts by providing funding, connections and a designated space for student-run clubs. These resources make it easier for students to start their own clubs, which in turn brings new faces to the teen center.

According to junior Melissa Bu, the Brookline Teen Center is consistently encouraging more students to participate in clubs there.

“I know that they are always trying to get people to get their clubs at the teen center or just promote the teen center because it’s such a great place,” Bu said.

Junior Henry Shaffer said that starting a club at the teen center is easy because club resources are the teen center’s greatest  offering to high school students.

“It’s pretty easy as long as you have a passion and other people have that passion too and share that passion,” Shaffer said.

Bu’s new initiative at the Brookline Teen Center, the Brookline Music Program, is a program that matches middle school students who play an instrument or sing to a high school musician. According to Bu, the teen center has a music studio, instruments and a recording studio, all of which help to support her club’s needs. Bu said that reaching out to the assistant director of the teen center helped her to get more instruments for middle school musicians.

“We talked to Jennifer Bray. She offered to reach out on eblast to all the Brookline parents to ask for old instrument donations,” Bu said. “And that’s really convenient for us because kids might not have an instrument.”

Senior Bridget McMahon is part of the Brookline Tutor Mentors, a program that has used the Teen Center in the past as a space for students and tutors. This is McMahon’s second year as a tutor, and she believes the space provides both tutors and students a place to work and to play.

“You’re matched with a middle school student and you meet on Sundays at the teen center. The food’s provided and half the time you’re meant to work and the other half of the time you’re meant to use the space and play with the kids, just enrichment.”

Shaffer said that an important resource at the Brookline Teen Center is the available money.

“They have the funds,” Shaffer said.  “And they want to fund you and experience whatever you want to experience.”

Bu said that the increase in clubs at the teen center has caused more students to go to there.

“And then it gets more people thinking, ‘what can I start here?’” Bu said.

McMahon believes that the teen center is a home for many clubs.

“I know Max Feldstein-Nixon, he built bamboo bikes, and that’s basically his club, Boston Bamboo Bikes, and he does that at the teen center,” McMahon said. “And the high school doesn’t allow him to do that.”

McMahon is also part of the teen board of directors at the teen center. She said a big part of what she does is community outreach to let individuals know that their clubs are welcomed.

“The whole idea of the teen center is teens for teens,” McMahon said. “So, the goal is that any teen can walk in with an idea and they’ll be supported by the staff.”