Are we doing all we can to maintain our members?

Are we doing all we can to maintain our members? It’s December, traditionally in December we drop members who have not paid their dues. Have we taken the time to find out why?  Have we reached out and talked to these great lions to try to bring them back into the club?

There are many reasons why people are leaving lions. We need to address these issues; we need to listen to them. We need to be an involved club. We need to keep our meetings engaging and having fun. We need to keep busy supporting our community both at the local and larger community. If members are struggling with paying dues let them make payments, so it’s not a large impact on their finances.  We need to be aware of personality conflicts and constantly try to resolve them.

Let’s not let these lions go away, let’s find out why and make our clubs more responsive to our members.

It has been proposed at the Multi District level that in order to boost attendance at our conventions we combine all of our districts and the multiple district conventions to meet at the same time in a centrally located site.

The way this would work is on the first night of the convention the individual districts would meet separately to take care of district business that normally transpires at the separate conventions. The second day of the convention would be the multiple district convention where all business for the multiple district would transpire.  This has a goal of making conventions more affordable while getting lions together from all parts of the state to share experiences and ideas.  The knowledge of how other clubs serve their communities enables us to learn new ways to serve our communities.

This is a way to control expenses and keep the cost of being a lion affordable. By doing it this way we cut costs at all levels of lions, we cut international expenses to pay for travel expenses for international directors and district governors, allowing them to invest more time in helping our clubs. This also cuts the costs of individual lions by not having to attend multiple conventions. Overall, I see this as a win-win for all lions.

As a Multiple district we still need to encourage and mentor our fellow lions to take positions of leadership at all levels. None of these leadership positions are hard and there are a lot of lions out there that are willing and able to help.  There is financial help at some of the levels of service. Being a leader in lions requires a level of commitment but can be the most rewarding time in your life. Reward yourself and be of service to your fellow lions.

Stephen Brewster

MD36 Council Chair