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By coincidence, two local civic clubs have received visits in the past week from from their district leaders. Last Thursday, Gordon Owens spoke to the Rotary Club of West Point and on Monday evening Tracy Thompson spoke to the Lions Club of Valley. Owens is from Roswell, Georgia and is the district president. Thompson is from Prattville, Alabama and is the district governor.

Both had similar messages – the need to build membership in organizations that lost members during the Covid pandemic and are struggling to get back to the way things used to be.

Studies have indicated that the pandemic inflicted a social cost on the United States of more than $16 trillion, or roughly 90 percent of the country’s annual gross domestic product (GDP). The pandemic affected the public’s mental health and well being in a variety of ways including isolation and loneliness, job loss and financial instability and illness and grief. The long-term lockdowns during the pandemic reduced social relationships and got people accustomed to dealing with restrictions on their out-of-home activities like going to church and participating in civic clubs and school booster organizations.

Leaders of churches, civic clubs and school booster groups are dealing with trying to build back to the way things used to be.

Both Owens and Thompson talked about ways their clubs are encouraging local clubs to build back membership and participation.

The Rotary Club, for example, is famous for their long-term efforts to wipe out polio, and the Lions Club is well known for what they do in the way of sight preservation.

Wild type polio – the original kind – has been on the cusp or global eradication for some time now. Enormous progress has been made in this except for one major region in the world, a remote area near the border of Afghanistan and Pakistan. There’s rising concern this problem could be worsening.

The West Point Rotary Club was founded in 1920 and has had such notable members as West Point Manufacturing Company President George H. Lanier, Chattahoochee Council Boy Scout leader H. Grady Bradshaw and Batson-Cook co-founder and president Edmund Cook.

The Valley Lions Club was chartered in 1980, the same year the City of Valley was created.

Lions Clubs in Alabama should be especially engaged in promoting sight preservation. It was Alabama-born Helen Keller who urged Lions Club members to be “knights for the blind” in a famed speech in Chicago almost 100 years ago now.

In his talk last week to West Point Rotary, Owens said that Rotary International is embracing a theme of “making the magic happen.” This is based, he said, on what a little African boy said when he first saw water running from a faucet. This took place in a project that Rotary helped fund. A water filtration system was installed in a remote area on the African continent, and when the clean water was turned on for the first time it caused a great sense of joy among the affected villagers.

When the water was turned off, a little boy watching it said “Make the magic happen again.”

“Rotary clubs can make magic happen not just in remote parts of the world but in your community as well,” Owens said.

He asked members of the club what issues needed to be addressed here. Suggestions were made to have more English as a second language instruction and to end poverty and homelessness.

“I encourage you to keep working on these problems and to keep moving the needle with the magic of Rotary,” Owens said.

He said that his club in Roswell had community gardens to help with those who needed fresh vegetables. Lots of what’s grown there helps feed the homeless in metro Atlanta.

Rotary has a foundation that provides grants to local communities. An estimated $2,000 a year can go to local programs and up to $25,000 can be gotten from a competitive grant program.

Vaccination doesn’t cost as much as many people think. It can cost as little as 60 cents per child.

“For more than 40 years now Rotary has delivered vaccines internationally,” Owens said. “There is so much need out there. We need to do all we can for children to grow up safely. We need to remember that polio hasn’t been completely wiped out. It’s one plane flight away from you if you are not vaccinated. Every child born in the U.S. needs to be vaccinated for polio. The choice is this: we can either stop having babies or to vaccinate every baby that’s born here.”

There is concern right now for a polio outbreak in Gaza because aid workers can’t get in.

“If your club gives $100 per member you can save 10,000 children,” Owens said. “If Rotary can raise $50 million, we can get $100 million for this from the Gates Foundation.”

The fight against polio will continue for some time. “Even when we get the world to zero new cases,” Owens said, “we’ll still have to vaccinate for several more years to make sure polio doesn’t make a comeback.”

Owens told club members to guard against feeling like they’ve met an important goal when they get a new member. “For your club to grow by one member in a year’s time, you’ll more than likely have to bring in five new members that year,” he said. “That’s because an average of four of your present members won’t be back. There’s always attrition in the form of people moving away, having job changes or health challenges.”

New members mean more volunteer hours for club projects and more fundraising potential for those projects.

He asked members to keep in mind a quote from Rotary founder Paul Harris. He said it’s as appropriate today as it was the day it was first spoken. “This is a changing world, and we must change with it,” Harris said all those years ago. “The story of Rotary will have to be written again and again.”

Rotary International presently has over 46,000 member clubs and more than 1.4 million members worldwide.

Lions International has similar numbers – 1.4 million members in 49,000 clubs in a total of 205 countries. Lions International is recognized as the world’s largest service club organization and humanitarian organization.

Thompson told members of the Valley Lions Club that she had grown up in the small town of Dozier, Alabama in Crenshaw County. She and her husband Robert have been active in the Lions Club for some time. He’s originally from Opp, Alabama and is a past district governor. He’s a retired state trooper.

Thompson said that the pandemic was tough on everybody. “We kept our club together by holding outdoor meetings,” she said. “A lot of clubs didn’t make it through and aren’t active today. Those that did survive are trying to build back today.”

“It was a tough period for us,”  Valley Lions Club President Phillip Sparks told her, “but we made it through.”

Thompson said that some of the Alabama clubs that closed are trying to get back up and running. “They need help from established clubs,” she said. “They need to find niche areas where they can serve their local communities. There are problems that need to be ironed out before they can get their club going again.”

Thompson makes lots of trips around the state to speak to local Lions Clubs. She carries with her a board listing goals for the district. They include two new clubs and 85 new members throughout the district.

“I’m asking each club to have two new members for every 10 members you have,” she  said. “My main goal is for the district to be in better shape than it was when I became the district governor.”

Thompson said there’s no one template for all Lions Clubs. “I’m a firm believer in doing things your way,” she said. “As long as you are serving your community, it’s okay to do it the way you are comfortable with.”

She said there are several clubs in the district that have yet to admit women members. “That’s their choice, and it’s okay,” she said.