If It Builds Community, It’s Worth Building: A Look into Kellogg’s Newest Communities
- Cathy Campo
- Jan 24
- 7 min read
Updated: Jan 27
By: Vidhur Potluri, Staff Writer At Kellogg, some of the most meaningful communities begin with a simple instinct: if something brings people together, it’s worth building around. Over the last year and half, students who saw the potential for connection in an idea or activity didn’t wait for it to exist—they built it themselves. The result is a new set of student-led clubs (including The Kelloggian!) built around everyday experiences, from baking and coffee to theater and food.
This article highlights four of Kellogg’s newest clubs and the students who turned a shared interest into lasting community.
Whisk Management (Kellogg Baking Club)
To understand how Whisk Management took shape last quarter, I sat down with Malcolm Joung (President & Founder; 2Y '27), alongside executive board members Jake Zastrow (VP of Community; 2Y '27), Anya Bali (VP of Marketing; 2Y '27), and Anna Lam (VP of Events; JV).
Whisk Management began the way many Kellogg ideas do: with a casual conversation that turned into something bigger. Malcolm realized that he and a few classmates all loved to bake and assumed a club already existed. When he asked around and came up empty, the idea of starting one quickly took shape.
“We thought to ourselves, surely this has to exist at Kellogg,” Malcolm said. “It felt too simple, too universal.” He created a group chat expecting maybe 20 people to join. “In the first week, we had something like 100 people join, and we thought, okay this might actually be a thing.” That early response was enough to push the idea forward, and Whisk Management was formally established soon after.
When I asked who typically shows up to Whisk Management’s events, Anya pointed out that baking can feel intimidating, especially when it requires expensive equipment or prior experience. “Someone who’s trying to get into baking might not want to make that full investment,” she said. Instead of assuming a baseline level of skill, the club encourages beginners to bake alongside others, making it easier to try something new without committing upfront or feeling out of place.
A typical event for Whisk Management, as described by Anna, is one of the club’s biweekly bake meetups. Each event is organized around a theme—winter indulgence, cake week, breakfast bakes, or something tied to the season—which gives participants a starting point without prescribing what they should make. Bakers sign up ahead of time, bake on their own schedules, and bring their creations to share at the meetup. The events are designed to be casual and flexible, allowing people to drop in between classes, try different baked goods, and spend time connecting without a formal agenda.
Jake spoke about ways to carry Whisk Management’s bakes beyond individual events. One idea he described was a community cookbook. “For our first quarter, the recipes that people brought for the different baking days, we tried to gather all of them together and pile them into a cookbook,” he said. The goal, he explained, is to create something people can take with them. “It’s kind of a memento for whatever brought us together,” Jake said. While the details are still being worked out, he added that the cookbook would likely be organized by type and released on a quarterly basis.
When I asked about the club’s long-term future, Malcolm described success as Whisk Management becoming an integral part of Kellogg life. “I really like the idea of it becoming something where people in future classes will talk about it and be like, oh yeah, no one ever thought a baking club was missing,” he told The Kelloggian. For Malcolm, that sense of inevitability is the goal. More broadly, he hopes it continues to give students a reason to try something unfamiliar. “That’s the whole point of being here,” he added, “to do something you would have otherwise not done, take a risk, and try something different.”
Kellogg Coffee House
Coffee House grew out of informal gatherings roommates and co-presidents Clay Andreen (2Y '26) and Derek Whang (2Y '26) began hosting early in their time at Kellogg. Prior to business school, Clay had organized coffee meetups with friends in Chicago, a format he brought with him to campus. Likewise, Derek had been involved in Dartmouth’s Coffee Club as an undergraduate and had experience building something similar. “From basically our first day together, we started hosting these coffee shops out of our house,” Clay said.
Attendance grew quickly. “The first one, I think we had like 40 people. The next one we had like 55. The next one we had like 70,” Clay recalled. “And we were like, oh my gosh, there’s kind of something here.” After a few months of hosting out of their E2 townhouse during the Fall Quarter of 2024, Clay and Derek decided to formalize what had started organically and began the process of launching Coffee House as a Kellogg club through KSA.
For Clay, the response reflected a gap in Kellogg’s social landscape. “I love a lot of the big parties,” he said, “but a lot of the social events revolve around drinking.” Coffee House was meant to offer an alternative. “We just didn’t feel like there was really a space to go and meet people and actually have deeper conversations,” he explained. Just as important, he added, was keeping the barrier to entry low. “You can just come hang out as you are.” That philosophy carries through to how Coffee House events are structured.
“People will just come by,” Clay said. “It’s like a tipping optional situation—you come by and grab a coffee.” These larger coffee shops now happen about once a month and serve as the club’s flagship events. In addition, Coffee House hosts smaller gatherings, including tastings and classes. “We’ll maybe have like 10 people over and try coffee from different countries,” Clay explained. “We did a pour over class, an espresso making class.” The smaller format allows for longer conversations and a slower pace. Underlying all of it is a principle Clay repeats often: “Our mantra internally is that for the coffee club, it’s not that deep,” he said. “I never want people to feel like they can’t come because they don’t know enough about coffee... At the end of the day, it’s just coffee.”
Kellogg Arts & Theater Society (KATS)
KATS took shape during the winter quarter of 2025, after Lauren Zwick (President, 2Y '26) began organizing group trips to theater performances in Chicago and realized how many Kellogg students were eager to attend together. After several outings, she learned that a theater club had previously existed at Kellogg but had gone inactive due to a lack of leadership transition. With support from others and the KSA team, she moved forward with reactivating the club.
KATS events center on attending live performances together. The club organizes group outings to shows across Chicago, often paired with optional dinners beforehand. “We’ll organize dinners before the show if people are interested,” Lauren said. “It’s not mandatory at all.” She noted that while theater can be a more expensive outing than typical Kellogg events, the club works to keep participation as accessible as possible.
Beyond performances, KATS has expanded into on-campus programming that encourages discussion and reflection. One standout example was a post-show discussion following The Book of Mormon, hosted in collaboration with the Latter-day Saint Student Association. The event featured a panel and a myth-busting format that examined which elements of the show reflected reality versus satire. Reflecting on the event, Lauren said, “We got a lot of really positive feedback,” noting that students appreciated the opportunity to engage more deeply with the material.
Lauren emphasized that KATS is not a performance group. “KATS is for people who are enjoyers of theater,” she said. “If you want to audition for theater, please see Special K!,” she joked. Instead, the club is designed for students who want to experience theater as audience members, whether they are longtime fans or attending their first live performance. She described KATS in three words: “collaborative, community-oriented, and creative.” When asked how she hopes students remember KATS after Kellogg, Lauren said, “I hope they remember feeling excited about seeing a show that they might not have seen before.”
The Green Table (Vegetarian Club)
The Green Table grew out of Ashwini Deshpande’s (2Y '26) experience navigating Kellogg as a long-time vegan. “I’ve been vegan for over 10 years now,” she said, explaining that she moved to Evanston after living in London, where a large vegan community made plant-based eating feel effortless. The transition was jarring. “Suddenly here, there was one vegan restaurant in all of Evanston,” she recalled. At Kellogg, she found herself one of the only vegans in the full-time MBA program. “A lot of the events never had vegan options,” she said. “I’d always basically take my own food along.”
Over time, Ashwini connected with others who were vegetarian, pescatarian, or simply curious about eating more plant-based. She started with an informal group that brought people together to try vegan restaurants in Chicago. “It was such a lovely community,” she said. “Every month or so we’d go try out a new restaurant.” That experience eventually evolved into what became The Green Table.
One of Ashwini’s priorities was making the club inclusive beyond strict labels. “When people hear 'vegetarian' or 'vegan club', they think they can’t be part of it if they’re not vegetarian or vegan,” she said. “But in reality, we’re super inclusive.” She emphasized that many members identify as "flexitarian" or pescatarian. “There is zero judgment around that,” she added. “As long as you want to share a meal with us.”
Those meals often serve as a starting point for wider conversations. “Maybe 20% of the conversations are about food,” Ashwini said, “but 80% is also just like everything else that we’re all doing at Kellogg.” She described discussions ranging from recruiting to climate initiatives to product innovation. “It really brings together a completely random group of people,” she said.
When asked how she hopes students will remember The Green Table after their time at Kellogg, Ashwini returned to the idea of belonging. “I hope they remember feeling included,” she said, particularly for students who are vegetarian or vegan. She also hopes the club leaves a small imprint beyond the meal itself. “Maybe they decided to try one new plant-based product,” she said. “Maybe they tried tempeh for the first time.” More than anything, she hopes they remember “some of those productive conversations that we had about food.”
Together, these clubs share a common origin: someone noticed a moment of connection and decided it was worth building around. Over the last year and a half, Whisk Management, Kellogg Coffee House, KATS, and The Green Table have grown from informal gatherings into spaces where students slow down, try something new, and meet one another outside of traditional academic or professional settings.
Their stories point to a broader takeaway. If an idea brings people together, it doesn’t need to stay informal. At Kellogg, students have the opportunity to turn everyday interests into lasting communities, and these clubs are proof of what can happen when they do. Read More by Vidhur Potluri: Veterans at Kellogg: Beyond the Uniform Passport to Evanston: Meet Kellogg's Exchange Students
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