The Morning Journal (Lorain, OH)
Are civic clubs dying?
It was noon Sept. 18 and Tony Mealy was sitting alone at a table in an Oberlin restaurant.
Mealy is a former president of the Oberlin City Club. He sent a news release the previous day saying the group had disbanded and was switching to weekly informal lunches instead of its formal dinners complete with an invited speaker.
The first of these lunches was scheduled to begin a half-hour prior.
As various bluesman Albert King songs played on the jukebox of the Brickyard Bar and Grill, also known as Sterk’s of Oberlin, Mealy explained the purpose of the group.
He said the Oberlin City Club was an offshoot of the National Exchange Club that was founded after the Exchange had made rules barring people of color from joining.
The Oberlin City Club had a robust membership for years, with numbers reaching the high-60s and 70s at one point.
Since then, the roll has dramatically decreased.
Even an initiative to bring women into the group about 10 years ago, only briefly stopped the bleeding, Mealy said.
The group voted Sept. 11 to disband. Its records were donated to the Oberlin College archives, audio equipment to the Oberlin Public Library and the rest of its funds to the Robert Thomas Scholarship Fund at the Community Foundation of Lorain County.
Mealy, a retired air traffic controller, moved to the city in 1965 and quickly joined a number of civic clubs including the Oberlin City Club, the Under 30 Club and the local Kiwanis Club.
These clubs are no longer in operation due to dwindling membership and participation, Mealy said.
“This is really the situation,” he said. “Church membership is down, civic organizations, military groups, political participation.” Rebirth? The demise of Oberlin City Club seems to be the case with older organizations and clubs, a few miles to the north in Lorain, there seems to be a rebirth of the concept.
The Millennial Group meets monthly at the Lorain Historical Society’s Carnegie Center, 329 W. 10th St., and bills itself as “a group of engaged young individuals devoted to betterment of Lorain through history and service.”
Barbara Piscopo, executive director of the Lorain Historical Society, said the group was formed in 2015 or 2016 when she was told that young people don’t care about history.
Piscopo said she got two young volunteers at the Historical Society together and tasked them with proving millennials care about the city and its history.
When the group first met, she said, it mainly was made up of former Southview students who knew each other from the Model United Nations club.
“They all came to the first meeting, and it’s just grown from there as word of mouth has spread, either through Facebook or Instagram, when we have meetings or projects,” Piscopo
said.
The millennial group draws comparison to the actions Mealy describes as being taken by the older, defunct civic clubs: a group of like-minded individuals meeting to discuss and work to make their community a better place through service projects and fundraising.
Piscopo said the Millennial Group is like the civic groups of old, but differs in a few key ways.
“I think it’s a group of people who come together because they care about their city, which is probably how a lot of these civic groups started,” she said. “However, we don’t aspire to be the Lorain Rotary. I don’t think that’s how people today of a younger age want to be known.
“We have regular meetings, we do things for the community and we have really good discussions and we’re very civic-minded. But if you’re going to say we’re going to structure ourselves as a rotary or any other organizations, that’s kind of where we’re not going to go.”
Piscopo said the group is structured and members attend meetings when they can rather than facing penalties for not attending a certain number of meetings.
She said any attempt to bring the group more structure might prove to be the end of the group.
It is this freewheeling structure that has led to offshoots of the original Millennial Group such as the Lorain Quick Picks group.
This group was the brainchild of Max Schaefer, a member of the Millennial Group, and they go out to parts of the city and clean them up for an hour.
It sounds like a simple idea, but in operation, the group has cleaned some parts of the city that needed it most, Schaefer said.
“An hour is not a lot of time to spend focusing on cleaning up a neighborhood,” he said.
His group has expanded and is scheduling more and more cleanups across town and the Millennial Group has been a huge support.
“Many of the regular volunteers who come out and dedicate their time to that are members of the Millennial Group,” Schaefer said. “We always hear people want the younger generations to be more involved, and I think this is a prime example of young people stepping up and getting involved in their community and making it a better place.”
Schaefer said he’s been involved in civic groups that floundered. The difference is the dedication of the membership, he said.
“Are the people passionate about (what you’re doing)?” Schaefer asked. “There has to be a level of passion. There also has to be the time that is able to be afforded to do something like that.”
As to why the Millennial Group seems to flourish while older organizations are falling away, Piscopo said it is the structuring and how it works for this generation.
“There’re people that come in and out based on what’s going on that day,” she said. “It just works.”
Cassandra Epps, a member of the Millennial Group, said its success can be attributed to the attitude of the participants.
“We all have a very positive attitude about Lorain, and we’re welcoming to any opinions, any options and anything anyone has to say,” Epps said. “We just try to be very open with everyone in the community.”
“An hour is not a lot of time to spend focusing on cleaning up a neighborhood.”
— Max Schaefer, a Millennial