GUELPH/WELLINGTON – It’s a crisp October night as a group of residents from around Centre Wellington gather in a meeting room in a small Downtown Fergus office housing lawyers, the provincial riding office and a few shops.
Coffee is brewing in the kitchen and baked goods are piled on a plate but there’s business to attend to first as the Optimist Club of Centre Wellington-Fergus (OCCWF) has its first meeting of the year, which for Optimists start in October.
A group of a dozen or so members plus a few guests discuss things like a BBQ fundraiser at a public school raising a few hundred dollars, the upcoming Santa Claus parade with other local service clubs and deciding to donate $250 to a haunted house attraction put on by Big Brothers Big Sisters.
It’s a few little things but add up to meaningful impacts in the local community to the tune of about $243,600 since this third iteration of a local Optimist Club started in 2005.
But there is a growing problem faced by this club and other service clubs: a declining and aging membership.
“Everybody’s having the same issue, it’s aging and it seems that there’s a cohort that we missed,” said Jim Dandy, the second longest serving Optimist member who first joined in 1978.
As Dandy alluded to, the Optimists aren’t alone. Tim Meyers from Palmerston is a Lion’s Club governor for District A-9 which covers 40 clubs in southwestern Ontario from northern Wellington County up to Owen Sound.
“A majority of them are seeing a decline in membership, of the 40 clubs I would say 17 that are in real decline that I have concerns about in the long term of their survival,” Meyers said.
“When I look around the clubs I see that we do not represent the communities, I see that mostly all the members are grey haired older people.”
It wasn’t always like this. Dandy recalled when he joined in the 70s the Optimist Club was a younger crowd made up entirely of men at the time — he said the Optimists were the first of the big four service clubs to accept women.
“We were so involved in the sporting scene because most of the guys that joined played sports themselves and the youth sports organizations all needed money,” he said.
The now 76-year-old Dandy thinks younger people have jobs that are a lot more time consuming than they did in the past and feel they don’t have time leftover after dealing with their work and families.
He also wondered if young people feel a bit put off by the demographic of service clubs.
“I mean, somebody who's in there twice comes to this meeting ‘there’s a whole bunch of grey hairs around, I don’t want to join that,’” Dandy said, pointing out this is kind of a circular problem.
Meyers said one thing that could accommodate younger and more diverse members is more flexibility with meetings, including the ability to do virtual ones.
“We need the young people to come in to tell us what projects interest them the most? I can guess but it’s been awhile since I’ve been young,” Meyers said. “Is it the environment? Youth mentorship? Health awareness? What is it that the youth want?”
The forecast isn’t all bad and the Optimists have brought in some new members after a bit of a rough patch, said OCCWF president Pierrette Grondin. This wasn’t due to a lack of effort as she explained she’s made a concentrated effort to bring in more people and wants to target a more diverse crowd that reflects the changing Centre Wellington community.
“I found that when you’re talking to new Canadians … they’re eager to get into clubs and they want to be part of what everybody else is doing,” Grondin said. “If you go to the schools now, you’ll see how diverse the population is now.”
Sherry Taylor was one of three new members inducted into the OCCWF at the Oct. 8 meeting. At 47 she is on the younger end of the membership.
“I felt like I had time to give and I wanted to do something productive with my time,” Taylor said on why she joined.
She felt people might not be as aware of the service clubs as a few people she told didn’t know the area even had an Optimist Club.
“I think that’s kind of a goal to change, get some more word out there and let people know what we do,” Taylor said.
One of the ways to get the word out is leveraging social media, which Grondin explained at the meeting the Optimists had done targeted ads on Facebook based on area code, the success of which remains unknown as of yet.
Tracey Curtis, a past assistant district governor for the seven Rotary/Rotaract Clubs in the Guelph and Wellington area, acknowledged they too have seen a decline generally but also a resurgence recently and said the club locally “stronger than ever.”
“I think as membership declined a little bit, the clubs are working collectively together which is great,” Curtis said.
Curtis said a lot of people think they don’t have time to commit to a service club but she stressed people only need to give a little bit of time if that’s all they have.
“People don’t think they have the time but it doesn’t take all that much time,” Taylor said. “You do what you can do and because there are so many people, everybody pitches in and works together and gets things done.”
Whether those things are a BBQ at a softball tournament, refurbishing and taking care of parks or holding a bicycle safety rodeo, Dandy worried about what happens if these service clubs were to go away.
“I don’t know what the answer is but I do know this, that is the Lions, the Optimists, Kinsmen all folded, who would run the Santa Claus parade? Would there be a Santa Claus parade for the little kids there?” Dandy asked. “It just wouldn’t happen.”
