Julie Rubenstein

You may have noticed the signs or logos around town, little emblems placed here and there announcing a meeting or project of the Rotary, Kiwanis or other service club. They don’t advertise their good works, other than the occasional plaque at a city or county park or an “adoption” sign on a stretch of roadway. By and large the members of these clubs toil in relative anonymity, deriving their gratification from the work itself and the thankful faces of those they serve. To outsiders, the work of these service organizations remains something of a mystery, so in the sprit of celebrating those who give, here is a rundown of who they are and what they do.

Most of the clubs are local branches of national or international chartered organizations. The three best-known groups are probably Kiwanis, Rotary and the Lions Clubs, each of which have multiple chapters in Josephine County.

Kiwanis
This is a worldwide organization active in 90 countries, with about 600,000 members worldwide. Their motto is “Serving the Children of the World.” There are two Kiwanis clubs in Grants Pass: Caveman and Grants Pass.

The Caveman Kiwanis club runs the familiar See’s Candies trailer parked downtown during holiday season, which generates some $30,000 annually to fund its charities. They serve local kids by granting $1250 college scholarships to seven graduating seniors at area high schools, plus two at RCC. They also sponsor building clubs and Key Clubs at the middle and high schools, and an esteem-building program at Riverside Elementary as well as helping with miscellaneous civic events.

The Grants Pass Kiwanis sponsors scholarships at Grants Pass and Hidden Valley High Schools and donates to at-risk youth through L.I.F.T. and College Dreams. They also run a “Quiltz 4 Kids” donation program for foster children, and they mentor HVHS students in the Future Business Leaders of America club, and middle schoolers through the Guiding Lights program. Their special focus in recent years has been care and improvement of County parks, where they’ve installed playground equipment, wheelchair ramps and other projects. Funding for their projects comes from operating the parking lots during the County Fair, and from various food booths.

Rotary
Rotary is another organization with a big international presence. First formed in Chicago in1905 as a way for male business owners to give back to their communities, it quickly spread around the world. Its motto is “Service Above Self.” Today, there are 1.2 million Rotarians (men and women) and over 32,000 Rotary clubs in about 200 countries. Locally, there are three clubs in Grants Pass and a new club in Cave Junction. Collectively, the area clubs sponsor the annual Rotary Duck Derby, which has generated about $650,000 for projects that included finishing Morrison Park and reconstructing athletic facilities at area high schools.

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Grants Pass Rotary is the oldest and biggest of the four. Its list of service projects is a long and distinguished one. This club spearheaded the development and implementation of two celebrated parks in our area: the All Sports Park (now called Reinhart Volunteer Park after the Rotarian whose dream it was) and then Morrison Centennial Park, named after another club member. It’s also responsible for the Wellness Wagon, a mobile health center currently in use as a dental clinic, providing free or low-cost treatment for persons who can’t afford care elsewhere.
Among their other projects, in no particular order, are:

• RYLA Sponsorship: Rotary Youth Leadership Academy is a leadership training course for incoming Juniors in the District’s high schools;
• Four Way Speech Contest awarding students for the best presentation about Rotary’s famous Four Way Test of the Things We Think, Say and Do;
• Rotary Invitational Track Meet, which has become a major West Coast event with nearly 1000 student athletes participating from 40 different high schools in Oregon, California and Washington. The club supplies all the awards and staffing with some help from the other Grants Pass Rotaries.
• Annual grant awards to community groups totaling about $10,000 in small “seed” grants for capital projects;
• YMCA spring swim program offering free swimming lessons to needy kids;.
• Donations to Rotary First Harvest;
• Scholarships of $2,000 each to a student from all four area high schools and one at RCC;
• Rotary Youth Exchange, in which they host students on both inbound and outbound exchanges, and take them on a drift boat/camping trip on the Rogue.;
• Student of the Year awards recognizing leadership with $1000 in gifts & certificates, and
• Sponsor of the Interact program at Grants Pass High School teaching the values of community service, and hoping to bring it to other high schools.

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Rogue Gateway Rotary is the second-oldest, retaining many of its charter members who are still active on the board and committees. With less than half the membership of Grants Pass Rotary, it has fewer service projects. But on a per capita basis, its members stay busy with both club-sponsored and other personal charitable or volunteer work. (This is true of most service club members - you seem to find them popping up everywhere a helping hand is needed.) Its current service activities include:

Student of the Year awards to students in area middle and high schools, recognizing them for their commitment to Service Above Self;

A Service Above Self award to a non-Rotarian adult working in the community;
Dictionary distributions to area third graders;

• Indian Mary Park reconstruction
• Quarterly Grants Pass Parkway Cleanups (its “adopted” section of Highway 199)
• Maintaining the stall barns at the JoCo Fairgrounds
• Donating to World Community Service projects, including water purification systems in Guatemala and construction, equipment and staff support for the Bhotechaur Health Clinic in a remote area of Nepal
• Collecting donations for the International Rotary Foundation
• Managing the Josephine County Christmas Basket Program that supplies full holiday meals to needy families;
• Collecting for Polio Plus, and
• Picking pears at the city’s orchards and making cash donations to Rotary First Harvest, a regional Southern Oregon fresh food collection program that feeds local people in need through various food banks.

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Greater Grants Pass Rotary is the newest club in Grants Pass. One of their earliest projects was helping raise funds for the cash-strapped county fairgrounds, another example of a service club stepping in when public funding for an important institution goes away. Since then, they’ve taken on:

• supplying homeless teens with day to day items for living, such as clothes, toiletries, furniture and kitchen accessories, to name a few
• supplying four families with children in a local elementary school with a turkey dinner, gifts for the kids and something for the parents
• contributing $500 to local food banks
• working on building weather shelters for some rural school bus stops
• establishing two scholarship funds for local high school students, and
• exploring ways to singly, or with a partnering club, develop a world community service project.

Lions Clubs
The motto of the Lions Club, a national organization, is “To encourage service-minded people to serve their community.” The mission of the Grants Pass and Illinois Valley Lions Clubs is to fulfill that promise in various ways. They raise funds by running food booths at the Fair and elsewhere, as well as parking lots during events. The Illinois Valley club is a major sponsor of the Cave Junction Labor Day Parade and festival. Their service activities and goals are:

• To provide eyeglasses and eye care to needy youth and adults.
  To provide hearing tests and hearing aids to the needy.
  To honor a “Student of the Month” from one of the local public high schools.
  To provide an annual college scholarship award to three of the “Students of the
  Month.”
• To conduct highway litter patrol on 2 miles of US 199.
• To adopt a needy family for Christmas each year.
• To support various youth programs.
• To provide Diabetes screening.
• To provide help with eye operations.

In addition to these organizations, there are many other area clubs with a mission of public service including the Grants Pass Active Club, sponsors of the Boatnik Festival and making grants to local agencies that serve children. Josephine County Toys for Tots, Habitat for Humanity and Paint Your Heart Out. Some of the organizations are made up solely of women, such as American Association of University Women, Zonta, and the Soroptimists Club, all of whom seek to help children and/or women gain equality and advancement in the business or education world through grants and a variety of service activities.

As the social services safety net through government continues to unravel, Josephine County is fortunate to have so many individuals working through so many organizations to help out. From Search and Rescue to animal rescue, this county practically runs on volunteer labor. Service are a good place for people who derive joy from serving the needs of others, and their volunteerism is rarely limited to working with the clubs where they belong. They’re the types who just naturally join in when there’s a call for help. As one of the Rotary club presidents put it, “these activities go largely unheralded as folks often do not seek any recognition and just go about these things more or less quietly in their lives as they literally practice `service above self’.”