Starting a Tarot Club

(Moderators, if this in the wrong section, please let me know.)

I'm hoping to start a Tarot Club or group in my area, as none seem to exist at the moment, and the closest is over an hour's drive away. Does anyone have any suggestions or tips?

We can meet at the local library, and I would like to start with a once-a-month meeting time. I'm not an expert, and the group would be for anyone interested, regardless of experience (or lack thereof).

I can advertise this in the library newsletter, as well as on other library bulletin boards. We also have a couple of local comic shops willing to post notices, and I think there are a couple of New Age stores in the area.

For the activities, I would like to talk about different decks and books, and would do some activities from The Tarot Playbook and 365 Tarot Activities. Before we start doing readings for each other, I would like to poll the group to see how they feel about it and how to set it up.

If anyone has experience in starting or belonging to a group, any help would be greatly appreciated.

I have an awesome group in the far Chicagoland burbs -my suggestion is to try meetup.com - my group has been meeting for over 9 years now - we used to meet at a Borders bookstore and now are at a café.

We have even had some AT people show up as well as speakers etc ...

In my experience, we tried the library (after Borders closed and we went homeless) and it sucked - too clinical - the cafes are much nicer, people come over to see what is up and some have ended up being part of the group - they only rule is people who attend have to purchase a cup of coffee or whatnot

If you have any other questions please feel free to msg me

definitely don't forget there is a tarot meetup section of the forum that you can post in here, make sure you put your country and area in the thread subject and local forum members might come along! People start a thread there and update it monthly about the next meeting and what's going on. There is a good example with Nicky and her local group updating with each meeting here, you never know when someone on AT might stumble across it or join from the same area!

You can also advertise in any tarot guilds or organisations, they often have a virtual "bulletin board". Also there is many tarot social network groups and pages, you could post in those. It might be worth making a Facebook group for the meetings (if you do it) and you can make invites to send out from there. There is a service called meetup.com where you can make a page for your group and the meetings. You can also see from it how many people are going or declined. Here is an example of a local group to me here. They meet up, do one hour of study and then socialising time and have it in a pub which is informal.

There is several tarot groups and meet ups around here and some of them have visiting speakers and interesting things like that. They are quite established though. But you could do something where each person in the club does a bit of a presentation of a card, maybe each week someone gets a random card and talks about what it means to them the next week. After starting out and getting to know each other, I think it's worth going for a large project you can all do, like exploring all 78 cards over a long period. Something where people are missing out if they miss one month, something like that

just some ideas to get it going

The first thing I would say is that make sure you have time to lead a group. As Nicky stated above the Second Sunday Tarot group has been meeting non-stop for 9 years once a month on the second Sunday. If it's Mother's Day we have "Bring your mom to tarot" day. If the pagan pride event is going on we have a "Tarot Shame Event" where people can bring the deck they are most ashamed they own. Point is that we make sure that the event happens and that one of both of us are there to make sure tarot happens.

Second I would say is to be comfortable with talking to new people about how to use tarot because for the first 2-3 years of the meet up we would have people sitting down taking their cards out of the plastic wrapping asking for help. At first we all just went through the cards one by one to get each others takes on them but as soon as the group matured we ended up offering a special early meeting time every 6 months or as demand had it where we would get people over the hump of starting to read.

The meet up has truly been one of the most rewarding things I have ever been a part of. We have a core of people now that also help run the Facebook group and take it upon themselves to bring topics and talks to the table. It took a while for that and in that time we all became better readers and better tarot people to boot.

I suggest the Bryant Park Library at Grand Central

its on 5th ave and pretty much all of the train lines go there

Thank you for all the advice and suggestions. I'm hoping to start up next month, and I will keep all this in mind.

Seldes Katne said:

(Moderators, if this in the wrong section, please let me know.)

Click to expand...

I'm not a moderator, but there's an area for precisely this right here <grin>.

You can use the MeetUps page or app to create a group and bring more people together and eventually you will not have to be the leader or moderator, or you will be but there will be members willing to aid you when you can't go. In my area are a lot of MeetUps with the theme of tarot, oracles, symbols, etc. I haven't gone to any yet because of lack of time, but I really want to!

What part of NYS did you have in mind? It's a pretty big state...

The Southern Tier. I live in the general vicinity of Binghamton.