District Cabinet Meeting - Saturday, March 9, 2020
District Governor's Report
Since March it has been very difficult on our organization. We have had to cancel our convention as well the State Convention has been cancelled. The State of WI is under a stay at home order which has further added to our stress and not being able to serve the public.
Membership: we are holding our own but are down 24 members thus far in 2019-2020. However we did add 126 new members but lost 150. The decreasing membership appears related to a retention problem and not a new member problem. The 24 members about 18 are related to deaths of members. This a trend we need to turn around. LCI has formed a new committee to aid the districts in turning this around called NAMI (North American Membership Initiative) more will be coming on this in 2020-2021.
New clubs we have had no new clubs but we were working on establishing new cyber clubs through the WI Lions Eye Bank and Restoring Hope Transplant House. Due to the COVID-19 stay at home orders we have had to suspend these projects.
Service: through 2019-2020 we have had 1835 service activities serving 242,491 people. When comparing to MD27 and lions we are doing well. MD27 averaged 657 activities per district and world wide 1934 activities. As for people served MD27 has served 99,547 per district and world wide we have served 231,019. We are down we compared to our results from 2018-2019 but this is largely due to the COVID 19 stay at home order. Our March, April and May service is down significantly, and these were historically big months for service. I am confident our service will return after the state open again.
Similarly our Campaign 100 donations are down in 2019-2020 we have collected about $31,000 while in 2018-2019 we collected about 37,000. This again may well be a consequence of COVID 19.
While COVID 19 has been a challenge I see great things as a result. I have seen many clubs adapting and picking up new service project such as delivering food to shut ins and making grocery deliveries, and many other projects. Also the stay at home order has impacted our clubs and many have adapted having meeting online through sites such as Zoom and our election will be done through the internet. While stressful this is leading us into the next century giving us skills to transition to a new way of conducting business.
Thank you for all your support we will get through this. Remember we serve.
Conrad Dreyer DG