Middle class shifts challenge traditional service clubs

They’ve been a fixture of city-limit signs for generations: Under the one that welcomes you to the community, two or three service-club logos and exhortations to join the Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions or Jaycees at their regular breakfast or lunch meetings.

Service clubs are many things, but exclusive isn’t one of them. Once the barriers to female members fell, membership grew through the 1990s, said Alan Dailey, executive director of the Michigan district of Kiwanis. But since then, the clubs have confronted a more troublesome hurdle: Young people.

“Most of us began a long time ago, and society was a whole lot different,” said Dailey, 65, who began attending meetings while still a college student. “What grew out of that is what would now be considered a traditional Kiwanis club – it meets on a regular basis, meetings include a meal, etc. That’s the older, grayer group. Those clubs have diminished over the years. They tend to kill themselves off, because they don’t replace their membership.”

Clubs like Kiwanis have long been a cornerstone of middle-class volunteering and service. But as the middle class has changed, so to have these once-fraternal organizations.

And there is some concern that community service may be waning somewhat. The Center for Michigan’s 2013 Michigan Scorecard notes that Michigan’s ranking among all states for volunteer hours per resident dropped from 13th to 35th in the past several years.

Younger adults complain they don’t have time for regular meetings, but they’re still keenly interested in service activities. They just want to do it their way.

“The level of people who feel dedicated to some form of community service is as high as it ever was,” Dailey said. “The question is, how to accomplish that.”

That question is something Dailey thinks about “every day of my life.” What he’s found is that younger people have little patience for the structure of clubs – the committees, boards and so on. They want to organize via social media. And they want project-based service where they can see a concrete result before moving on to the next thing.

Myles Romero sees the same thing. As marketing director for United Way of Southeast Michigan, he’s seen the requests made by volunteers change since the economic downturn.

“Four years ago, it was, ‘Can we go to a school and paint the walls,’ and they’d feel good about that,” said Romero. “Now people want to do more that is directly connected with impact. It’s, ‘Can I do something that’s going to help someone and my community, too.'”

These trends have led to startups eager to cater to a new generation of volunteers. One Brick Detroit is part of a 12-city network that seeks to match willing hands with work that needs doing.

Rebecca Chinn is the volunteer head of the Detroit chapter, and oversees 900 volunteers, who are dispatched in groups of at least 10 every weekend and some weeknights. They serve food at soup kitchens, clean up blight, paint buildings, do yard work.

“This is volunteering made easy,” said Chinn, who works as a high-school teacher in South Redford. “People want to volunteer, but because work demands are so heavy, because family life is different, they can’t make long-term commitments.” All One Brick asks is that a volunteer show up for one project, do the work and go home. Whether and when they might return is up to them.

The project-based approach has also been felt at the United Way, in part because people aren’t as confident of their ability to commit over a long term, or because they don’t necessarily want to commit to one organization.

“They want to do a day of service, or ‘volunteer my way on my schedule.’ It has put pressure on how we customize our volunteer experiences for that kind of market.”

Volunteers also want a follow-up email from the organization after their work is done, detailing how the project turned out, Romero said.

“(The work) has to be relevant now. People know what the issues are.”

For clubs like Kiwanis, where ongoing membership is the point, Dailey said the group has experimented with “satellite groups” that don’t necessarily meet every other week for lunch and fellowship.

A satellite may meet less often, or tackle projects of their own design.

“Attendance used to be a big thing,” said Dailey. “We used to track it. It’s still meaningful to older members, but not so much to younger ones. In a satellite group, it’s get together once or twice a month, think about what you want to do in service, and go do it.“