Westport Lions Roar
By Lion Bob Reddick
Governor Shelley Gauthier from Distric A4 presented Westport Lion Jim Scala with a badge honouring our club’s contribution in meeting the Lions Clubs International Centennial Service Challenge of serving more than 100 million people.
On July, 8, 2014 – Lions Clubs International President Joe Preston announced in Toronto at the 97th annual International Convention the goal of serving 100 million people by 2017. This humanitarian initiative was designed to bring Lion Clubs from all over the world together to celebrate Lions 100th anniversary in 2017 and to do what Lions do best – “serving others.”
Since that time, Lions Clubs have easily reached that goal and to date have served 215,542,725 people according to Lions International website. With aproximately 70% of clubs participating in the five categories of Youth, Environment, Vision, Hunger and Diabetes.
Individual clubs decide which categories are best for their club and community. By far, helping youth is the number one focus with over 32,000 clubs serving more than 66,000,000 young people.
Protecting and improving our environment, preventing unnecessary blindness through vision screening and education, and various sight projects involving the blind, and people with very poor vision rank second and third. Improving access to healthy food for under privileged individuals in your community comes in at fourth.
Halting diabetes and improving the quality of life for people that have been diagnosed with diabetes has the lowest rate of participation of the five categories but is a relatively new focus for Lion clubs with 4,500,000 people served and close to 10,000 clubs involved. With diabetes on the rise worldwide, the number of people served will surely rise.
Westport Lions Club 