It’s hard to close the door on 45 years of tradition, but the other night we voted with one final clang on the ceremonial brass bell to disband the Prescott Evening Lions Club. While I’ve enjoyed being president these last three years, I didn’t want to assume the role of “President for Life” but the members still attending our meetings had all held my position several times through their years in Lions and didn’t want to give it another run.
We’ve been small but mighty since Covid hit and we enjoy our Monday night meetings. It was hard to imagine hanging up our yellow Night Rider vests, but sometimes you have to take a hard look at what your purpose is and see if you are still meeting the goals. We hit a membership point where it made more sense to share our talents with other groups and make them stronger.
I’m happy most of our club members have decided to continue as Lions in the local community. We’ll keep busy selling Christmas trees, recycling newspapers, staffing the mobile Vision Van, collecting used eyeglasses to repurpose, and serving pancakes and sausages during Prescott Territorial Days in June. Lions Club events raise money to help local non-profits, support our schools, and provide student scholarships, to name a few things. “Where there’s a need, there’s a Lion” is a guiding principle of Lions Club International and I think it still rings true, almost 107 years after its start by Arizona native Melvin Jones.
While new Lions Clubs continue to start up around the world, I do worry about how we get new members to join our local clubs. Until recently, I was the youngster in our Evening club and I’m no spring chicken at 56. Some of us are joining the Prescott Noon Lions, who have been around since 1949. At the meeting this week, they read off the April birthdays and pretty much everyone celebrating was older than the club itself. Last year, because my knees are still good, I volunteered to be the food runner at the pancake breakfast, making multiple trips up and down the stairs carrying big pans of cooked sausage.
While I haven’t popped into a Kiwanis meeting, or stopped by the Elks Lodge, or visited the Independent Order of Odd Fellows to know for sure, I have conducted an unscientific study during the Frontier Days and Veterans’ Day parades and determined that many of the club members marching with their organizations are my age or older. We’ve got plenty of wisdom and experience to share, we just need to find new ways to lure the Millenial and Generation Z folks in our community into joining our clubs.
I suspect we are going through some big changes in the way people get involved in organizations like Lions. Lately, new clubs have formed online that have members from all over the world instead of just the local folks who can make it to physical meetings. In Phoenix, there’s a World Global Artists club and a Lions Without Borders club. Maybe the future of service clubs will be a mix of virtual meetings, online fundraisers, and in-person events.
I also think it’s important for service clubs to find new ways to share what they do and why it’s important to our community. It’s easy to assume that people have heard of and know what your organization does, but chances are they don’t. Until I joined, I had no idea women could be Lions. I had seen Lioness clubs and assumed that Lions Clubs were for men only. Then I met Cynthia and Karen, who were wearing yellow Lions vests at the “Wreaths Across America” ceremony at the Prescott National Cemetery. They were president and vice president respectively, and invited me to join them for a free dinner at their next meeting. I was hooked.
If I hadn’t bumped into Cynthia and Karen that day, I would have missed out on meeting so many amazing people who live up to our motto: “We serve.” And if you’re like me, you may only have a few hours of spare time you can give each month, but by combining your hours with other people’s hours, they grow into something big and beautiful that you could never pull off on your own. I never imagined I’d be screening pre-schoolers for vision issues. Or helping cook breakfast at the Salvation Army one morning and seeing what a gift a hot meal and a warm place to eat it is when that’s not something you get each day. Even if you think you don’t have time, find an organization whose mission speaks to you and join them as a guest at their meeting. You never know, it might even change your life.