Gather signatures and form the club

A signer gives their email, name, and address, and that address has to fall inside your neighborhood's mapped boundary. Someone outside it is turned away and no signature is recorded, which is the point: a neighborhood club should be proven by the neighborhood. Signing twice does nothing, and people already signed in can sign with one click.

Your petition page shows the running count against the goal, and the manage panel is where you adjust settings or close it. You can also have it email you on every new signature. The signature that lands exactly on the goal triggers the important one: an email to whoever can formalize the petition, which for a neighborhood club means your neighborhood's organizers.

Neighborhood organizers work from a review queue of every petition in their community, with the ones awaiting a decision first. Once yours is at its goal, a Form the club button appears there and on the petition page. Some neighborhoods skip that step entirely and form the club the moment the goal is met — the affiliation choice on the petition form says which kind yours is. Either way everything carries across: the name, the description, the look you chose, the visibility, and the web address people have been sharing. You become the club's first organizer and host, and everyone who signed gets an email inviting them to join — the best first-day roster you'll ever get.

Many neighborhoods ask the people who run their clubs to accept something first — usually terms, a liability waiver, or a code of conduct. If yours does, the first time you open your club's manage area you'll land on an agreement screen instead of the dashboard, with the documents to read and one box to tick. Accept it and you're through; everything else in the club is waiting behind it. We record your name, the date, and a copy of the wording exactly as it read that day, so a later edit can never change what you agreed to.

Once you're through, Manage → Handbook holds everything your neighborhood has published for its clubs: the agreements you accepted, with the date and who signed them, plus any guidance they wrote about booking spaces, money, or getting the word out. It's worth ten minutes on day one. It's also the reason to put anything important there rather than in an email — the next person to run your club will find the Handbook, not your inbox.

Two honest endings. An organizer can decline the petition, optionally with a reason that gets emailed to you. Or you can close it yourself with Close this petition, which is the right move when interest simply fizzled. Both are final and the signatures stay on record, but neither is a black mark: starting again is just a new petition, and a second attempt with a sharper pitch is a perfectly normal thing to do.