Bright future
St. Eleanors Lions Club looking forward to 2019
For 57 years the St. Eleanors Lions Club has been a hub for their community and, for the moment anyway, it has no intentions of relinquishing that responsibility.
With 2018 drawing to a close the Journal Pioneer decided to check in with a few local nonprofit groups working to make our community a better place and see how they did last year and what they’re looking forward to in 2019.
The St. Eleanors Lions Club currently has 20 male members and 27 female members, the Lions and Lionesses act independently for some projects and jointly for others. Both are based out of their long-time clubhouse at 121 East Dr.
The building is owned by the city and leased back to the group.
“In St. Eleanors, before the city amalgamated, it was pretty much the only place you could go for anything. Half the people in St. Eleanors were married there,” remarked Stewart Arkwell, the group’s long-time treasurer.
Originally the service group’s mission was to do community works and along the way raise funds to assist people with visual impairments.
However, its scope of focus has evolved over the years to include people with other forms of disabilities as well. They also spend money helping out families in need around Christmas time, preparing food and gift hampers in partnership with Greenfield Elementary School and do a number of other things to support the community.
Arkwell said that in the past year the clubhouse has seen more use than usual as they have a couple of new programs occupying the space regularly.
Monday nights at the club is the Tops group, then there is chair yoga on Tuesday and Thursday morning, Wednesday nights it’s the Scouts and Friday nights it’s the dart players.
Those are just the regular events, there is also one-off or special events like weddings, anniversaries, community meetings and conferences.
To raise their funds they sell Christmas trees, put on roast beef dinners, hold auctions and sell tickets to a 300-ticket cash lottery draw.
Arkwell added that 2019 is gearing up to be an exciting one for the club as plans are in the works to secure funding for renovations to the building.
If the money is secured the resulting renovations will provide some much-needed new life to the clubhouse, so it can continue to serve the community for many years.
Other than the renovations, Arkwell added that there is not a great deal of new programming or events planned for 2019. But they will continue to put all their efforts into their current programming, just like they have for the past 57 years.
“If we can continue on with what we’re doing, we’ll be doing pretty well,” he said.