Add a recurring Friday youth event

Sign in to your ecclesia (e.g. riverwood.cdroster.com) and pick Manage → Recurring events from the left rail. This is the administrator’s home for repeating events. Every recurring class, meeting, or gathering — alongside your existing memorial meeting or seminar — starts here.

Before you create the template itself you’ll need an scheduling group to file it under — that’s the next step.

Scheduling groups bucket related events together and let you assign a coordinator scope. Even if a “Bible Class” group already exists, giving the youth their own group keeps the roster workload separate from the mainline meeting and lets you appoint a dedicated youth coordinator later.

Pick Groups from the Scheduling sidebar, click New group, then fill in:

• Name: “Friday Night Youth”.
• Description: a one-liner your coordinators will read later — e.g. “Fortnightly Friday supper class for the youth”.

Click Create group. You’ll land back on the groups list with Friday Night Youth in it — ready to attach templates to.

Back on Recurring events, click New recurring event in the top-right corner and choose Activity template (a repeating event where every occurrence is the same — as opposed to a study series that walks a curriculum). Don’t agonise over the choice: if the event later turns out to need a curriculum, Convert to series on its detail page switches it in place, keeping every occurrence and its roster history. On the form:

• Pick the Scheduling group you just created — “Friday Night Youth”.
• Give the template a short, recognisable Name. Members see it on the calendar and in reminder emails, so “RYC Class” reads better than “Youth template v2”.
• Set Effective from to the first Friday you want this cadence to start.
• Pick the Local start time — typically the time supper begins, say 7:30 PM — and enter a Duration (minutes) if you want reminders to show the finish time. Duration is optional; leave it blank if the class runs until people go home.

Scroll to the Recurrence card and set three fields:

• Frequency: Weekly.
• Repeat every: 2. Combined with Weekly, this reads “every two weeks”.
• Weekdays: tap Fri so it’s highlighted. Leave the other days off.

If your RYC year has a natural end date — say December for the summer break — set Repeat until. Leaving it blank means the calendar keeps generating occurrences on that cadence with no cut-off, which is usually what you want for a program that resumes each year.

Monthly patterns: if instead your event meets monthly, set Frequency to Monthly and pick a pattern — either On a day of the month (e.g. the 15th) or On a weekday, where you choose an ordinal (first – fifth, or last) and a weekday. That’s how you get “the 3rd Thursday of every month”. Choose last for the final weekday of the month; the fifth only occurs in some months.

Note: the first occurrence is the earliest Friday on or after your Effective from date. So if you want the very first class on a specific Friday, set Effective from to that Friday exactly.

Seasonal start times: if the event shifts time with the seasons — a summer 10:00 start, an evening winter one — you don’t need two templates. In the Seasonal start times section add a rule per season: a date range and the start time (and optionally duration) to use inside it. Tick Repeats every year and give the range as MM-DD (a From after the To wraps the year end, so 12-01 → 01-31 covers December and January); untick it for a one-off range and use full YYYY-MM-DD dates. Occurrences inside a rule’s range use its time; the rest fall back to the start time above.

Role slots tell CDRoster which jobs need volunteers at each occurrence. Click Add slot and pick a role from the dropdown — something like Chairman or Speaker, at quantity 1. Click Add slot again for each additional role: an upfront supervisor, a supper coordinator, whoever your class format needs. Bump quantity to 2 if you routinely need two people in the same role on a busy night.

You can also leave this section empty — either on the first pass, to edit later once the youth coordinator confirms the format, or for good. A roleless recurring event still expands onto the calendar; it’s just a plain repeating entry the scheduler never tries to fill. That’s exactly right for something like a Sunday School session or a standing social that needs a calendar slot but no roster.

Click Create template. CDRoster stores the pattern and immediately expands the next several occurrences onto the calendar (out to the tenant’s occurrence horizon — 18 months by default; your administrator can nudge it in Ecclesial settings).

Head to Calendar from the top nav and jump to the month of your first Friday. You should see a chip labelled with your template name on every second Friday, alongside your other recurring events. Click one to open the occurrence detail page — that’s where the youth coordinator will roster the class leader and speaker.