After 65 years of serving the Shediac community, the Lions Club is calling it a day.
The services they provide will cease on June 30.
“Recruiting new members has become very difficult, and I think it’s a bit of a sign of the times. To a certain extent, people are very busy with family life and business life. Young people tend to be very involved in their family, and that doesn’t leave much time outside of their daily lives to help with fundraising or just general projects that we may want to put together. So, it’s become more and more difficult,” President Marc Cormier explained.
In an interview with our newsroom, he said they’re down to six or seven members, with some of them dealing with health issues, making it difficult to be available for projects.
“I remember when I joined more than 24 years ago, it was something that you did as a good way to meet people in the community and participate in the betterment of the area. Things have changed. Some of the projects that we used to do. For example, one project that we used to do was a food drive once a year in May. We used to do a food drive for the local food bank. We would pick up anywhere between $3000 and $5000 worth of food in one day,” Cormier expressed.
This isn’t the first time the Club has experienced difficulties. Cormier explained that back in 2014, it almost folded, but they were able to bring it back from the brink.
“I think at that point, all that was left was something like three members, and they were just about ready to pull the charter from the club when some of us who had been on hiatus decided to try to see if we could salvage it. A group of us got back in and started the ball rolling again, and we did manage to keep it going until now, but the last, I’m going to say the last three years, we’ve had more and more difficulty getting people to join,” Cormier stated.
There will be no official doors closing on the Club, though, because Cormier explained that they haven’t had a Club location since 2014, when they previously had difficulties. They would meet twice a month at the multipurpose centre in Shediac.
Looking back to 1961, when the Shediac Lions Club was first founded, Cormier says it provided the community with their first ambulance, “Back in those days, it was actually manned by a Lions member volunteering. This is totally different from what we’re seeing today. Our last project was a fundraiser where we ended up raising $10,000 to help the local fire department buy a new rescue boat or a rescue pontoon. Schools in the area were having issues with kids coming to school in the morning with no breakfast, so we decided to help them fund breakfast. So we were spending almost $40,000 a year helping the schools with their food, buying food and so on and so forth. These are just some of the projects we helped with,” Cormier said.
Cormier told us the Shediac Lions Club has around $85,000 remaining in funds from a Chase the Ace fundraiser with the Shediac Legion. Cormier said they thought it over and wanted to make sure that money went to something that would continue to benefit the residents of Greater Shediac.
“We’ve made arrangements with the town. We wanted to be sure that that money would be redistributed or reused for the benefit of the Shediac residents. After discussion, we knew that the town was in the process of wanting to build a new recreation centre. We don’t know all the details yet, but there’s talk about one or more ice surfaces, and there’s talk about a pool, potentially an indoor walking track, gyms or with training equipment and so on,” Cormier stated.
They decided those funds should go to the Town for use towards the recreation centre.
“The Shediac Lions Club has had a tremendous run. It was very instrumental in helping the area, but at the end of the day, the time has come,” Cormier expressed.
