Save Tora-Con and the RIT Anime Club

Thank you again to everyone who has supported us over these past few months. In recent weeks, the Center for Campus Life (CCL) has been working with Anime Club to create a solution to the issue that would allow for our continued growth and success as an RIT student organization. Due to the close timing of these talks with Tora-Con and the whirlwind of preparation work that our members complete for a successful event every year, we decided to hold off on this announcement until now.

CCL has offered us a similar amount of club storage space to our current amount in the room next to our current one. In addition, they have given us large, lockable bookshelves (in the hallway with other club storage lockers) for easy access to our library collection. They have even offered to purchase us new shelving for the club storage space to replace the ones that we’ve been using for the past few years. Anime Club believes that this storage solution will work well for the foreseeable future, allowing for the continuation of both the club and Tora-Con for years to come.

We’d like to thank everyone again for the support that we’ve been shown and apologize if we were unable to directly respond to individual comments about the situation. While this update may be shorter than others in the past, more words will not help us describe how grateful we are to all of our supporters. We hope that you will continue to support us far into the future.

Thank you to everyone who has supported us through this whole ordeal. We’ve received many messages of support from alumni, students, organizations, and more. The outpour has helped us continue with this when we had our doubts and really helped our arguments. If you are willing to be listed publicly as a supporter or have your comments used in our advocacy efforts, please let us know. We understand that community relations can be a thin line to walk along and don’t want to post your comments or name without prior consent.

While we hope to update everyone as soon as possible, please understand that those of us working on this matter are students who must also pay attention to our studies, jobs, and other extracurriculars. We’ve also been very busy these past few weeks with the scope of events that the RIT Anime Club ran and our recent Winter Charity Auction. This update may be long, but we hope that it properly conveys what has been happening these past few weeks. We also believed that recent meetings would help resolve many of the issues that we are facing. Thank you for your patience and cooperation.

On November 6th at the Student Government Student Affairs meeting, our PawPrints was addressed by those in the committee. We appreciate the chance to advocate for ourselves, but feel different methods are necessary. The interests of those here to support us are in question as an advisor for RIT’s Student Government is the Director of the Center for Campus Life (CCL).

On November 14th, leaders from CCL met with three of Anime Club’s eboard members, our faculty advisor, and an RIT ombudsman. While we didn’t sense hostility and aggression from CCL, we felt that it was due to the presence of those who aren’t student members of our club. The following three paragraphs detail topics discussed in this meeting.

A few “potential” and temporary solutions that have been suggested were the rentals of portable storage pods and the reserving of temporary building space on campus. CCL has said that they could rent portable storage pods to place on-campus for us when we need it for events, however, we have reason to believe that the money for that won’t continue into the future or will be denied due to our history of financial independence. While renting out building space on campus temporarily was suggested, we don’t know where this space would be as there aren’t many rooms that aren’t already being used for daily classes and activities. Furthermore, for both options, we tend to need extra storage space frequently with all the events that we run and the different event styles that happen weekly.

The RIT Anime Club has not been given a guarantee on the future of our club room, only that we will not be getting the space back after its reassessment and renovations. They have retracted their statement of needing us to discard 50% of our materials before mid-December and said that they’d like to shift the timeline originally given. Another meeting to discuss the situation will tentatively be held in January or February.

There have also been many suggestions to give our materials to other RIT departments, however, we still feel that it is of greatest benefit to the community in our hands. If the day comes when we will have to discard a portion or all our materials, we would like to make sure it is in safe hands which would be those who have been supporting us. It feels as though we have received an outpouring of support from everyone except for CCL.

We request better overall treatment for affected clubs when it comes to storage, the cost to work with RIT providers for events, and more. Experiential learning is important for the college experience and measures keep being placed to prevent that from happening here. For now, our focus is on our request to keep our club room or be able to fully move back into it after renovations are complete.

For everyone who has been supporting us, we thank you from the bottom of our hearts. We’re in the midst of planning for Tora-Con 2026 and are keeping true to our commitment of holding an amazing event for the community and beyond. We are doing our best when it comes to working with RIT for better treatment for the RIT Anime Club and Tora-Con 2026 but are looking into and exploring our options for the future. Please continue to support us, the Model Railroad Club, and the Amateur Radio Club, throughout this whole process and keep sharing our petitions and news so that our efforts don’t fall out of the spotlight. Thank you again. We will keep doing our best to get the space we need and deserve, so please keep supporting us by showing RIT how much we matter to students, alumni, and the community.

New additions to this page:

• Link to an article by The Reporter on the storage situation affecting clubs (see below)

• Links to the Model Railroad Club’s petitions and their update (see below)

• The ability for organizations to be listed as a community supporter here