The Illinois Lion Lioness Leo Web Magazine
Vol. 1 Issue 11
May, 2014
There are many ways to gain new members: ask someone to attend a club meeting to show them what your club does, ask someone to help with a fund raising event that you are doing in your community and then explain to them what the money raised will be used for, and make sure that you have some fun along with the hard work that we do. There are opportunities to involve the young people of your community to make them aware of what Lions do. But you have to care about your club and your community to be able to show that you care and want to continue to be of service to those that we serve.
Greetings to All! This Lions year 2013-2014 has went by rapidly and we are looking forward to our state convention coming up soon. If you have not made arrangements to attend, please do so. PDG Judy Tapper and her committee are working hard to make this year’s convention a fun learning time for us all. We are looking forward to having PIP Jimmy and Lion Velda Ross with us as our speaker.
Retention or keeping our members is a problem area for many clubs. Do you try to find out why a member is leaving your club - why does that member not want to stay in your club. Perhaps the member has to take a new job and transfer to another community, help and encourage them to look for another Lions club where they are moving to and assist them in transferring their membership. But perhaps that member is tired of being ignored or not involved in the club activities/meetings. Do you care enough to ask why they are leaving?
The Council of Governors for 2013-2014 are working hard in their districts to make their year a success. The Council has worked hard to run the State’s affairs as a business and have worked to include the 1st and 2nd VDGs in their decisions so that they will be better prepared to take on the reins of leadership in their upcoming years of service to our state.
We need quality members to step up into leadership positions, in our clubs, in our districts and in our state. Do you work with interested members to mentor them into leadership positions - or - do you just keep putting the same people into those positions and thereby not allow someone who is interested to move up. Many of our districts currently do not have a 2nd VDG in their line of succession. We need to ask ourselves why this has happened.
There are two primary choices in life ... to accept conditions as they exist, OR to accept responsibility for changing them. We all must make a choice on how the Lions, Lioness and Leos are to progress here in MD 1. Do we want to continue the downward spiral that we currently are on? Do we want to continue to allow rumors and gossip to rule us? If you are content with how the membership numbers are, if you are content with the loss of present members and not keeping them in our clubs, and if you are content with a limited number of new clubs being formed here in MD 1, then you are accepting the conditions that now exist. But if you are unhappy with the lack of membership gains, if you are unhappy with the loss of many good members from our clubs, if you are unhappy with the fact that there are many areas that need a Lions club, then I challenge you to step up and accept the responsibility for making the needed changes here in MD1.
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Communication is key to success for us all. We need to make use of social media to maintain contact with our members. We need to make sure that those without computer access get the messages that are put out by our leadership. We must work at training our members (all our members) to help them to stay current on happenings in Lionism. We must stop being the best kept secret in the World. Unity is extremely important in Lionism. We cannot accomplish or meet our goals when we are not working in unity with each other. We must put our personal feelings aside many times and work on building our clubs, our districts and our state into a unified group of dedicated Lions, Lioness and Leos who are working towards the only goal of making ourselves a better