Awards-Installation 2021

New president’s remarks

By Roy Ockert

This is my third time to be installed as president of this club, and I hope I can get it right this time. Then I’ll leave it to Matt to go for a new record fourth term. It has, of course, been an honor for me each time, and I consider my work for this club more important that anything I do for the District.

On Aug. 1 the Kiwanis Club of Jonesboro passed its 86th year of existence. In that time we’ve touched countless lives. I was reminded of that recently when a friend of mine responded to a Facebook post I did about one of our meetings.

Anne Crow is the widow of Charlie Crow, who died on Christmas Day 2019 at age 79. Charlie was one of three sons of Wendell Crow, the longtime editor and publisher of the Rector weekly newspaper — all three members of my college fraternity. I became especially close to the youngest son Mark, who was my roommate and head photographer of the yearbook when he was killed in a car accident in 1966, just short of his 20th birthday.

Charlie was one of our fraternity's most distinguished alumni, working counterintelligence in the U.S. Army, then joining the staff of Texas Gov. John Connally, and in 1972 the Cabinet of Gov. Dale Bumpers as director of the Department of Planning. Later he was a leader in several innovative businesses and non-profits, even recorded an album of folk music.

Anyway, it was Charlie’s widow Anne who wrote this note on my timeline: “Long ago, this Kiwanis Club gave me a scholarship and made it possible after my father's death to go to ASU. He belonged to the Jonesboro Kiwanis Club, and to get it I had to come a speak to them once a year with good grades, of course. Thanks for making a difference for Anne Horn.”

That would have been in the late 1950s, meaning that Anne would have been one of our first scholarship recipients since our scholarship program was started in 1955. She earned a teaching degree here and then married Charlie. Both of them later got master’s degrees, and she had an outstanding career in education.

We can’t know what might have happened if our scholarship program hadn’t enabled Anne to attend A-State, but it certainly made a difference in the lives of her and Charlie, their siblings, children and grandchildren.

That’s just one of many reasons why I’m proud to be a member of this club and why I’ll do anything I can to make sure it continues as a vital part of this community.

All of you here feel much the same way. Before the pandemic and since then, you’ve been active in whatever the club has done. Now I’m going to ask you to do a little more.

Our numbers are smaller now — 40 members, fewer than half of whom are active — which makes our club’s future less certain. We can reason that’s all part of the decline of civic clubs. But Paragould and Batesville, both much smaller cities than Jonesboro, have about 10 more members than we do and are more active. The Conway club, in a city about the same size as Jonesboro, has 111 members and continues to grow, even last year.

As we start a new year, I’m asking you to join me in re-examining what we do, how we do it and how we can do better. I’m re-establishing our committee system, along the lines prescribed in our bylaws, spreading out responsibility, and we will depend on these mostly small committees to make things happen.

I’m setting some special goals for most committees. Let me just tell you about a few of them.

I’m asking the Program Committee, which will be led by Ron Sitton, to be more innovative in planning our weekly programs — to make our weekly meetings more fun as well as informative. The special goals: Having at least two field trips and at least two club programs social in nature, like our recent picnic, or produced by our own members.

Our Community Services Committee will be chaired by Gregg McElhanon, and I’m charging that group with leading us into more community service projects. Taking part in the United Way Day of Caring once a year isn’t enough. I’m asking the committee to plan at least two community events, one of which will be a public employees appreciation event like we did in June, and involve the club in at least two volunteer projects of our own.

The Membership Committee is probably our most critical and will be headed by Matt Silas, who has proven to be our best member recruiter. Recruiting has been virtually impossible during the pandemic. But I’m setting an ambitious goal: A net gain of five members by this time next year. I’m also asking the committee to try to bring back those members who have become inactive.

The Youth Programs Committee, better known as the Scholarship Committee, has been led by Sid Banks forever, and it will continue to do the hard but important work annually of selecting our scholarship recipients. But it will have a subcommittee headed by Traci Perrin that will try to ramp up our service leadership programs. Specifically: establish a better working relationship with the Jonesboro High Key Club, our only SLP, and to work toward establishing three other youth leadership programs by this time next year.

That’s not all of our committees, of course. None is more important than the Pancake Day/Fund Raising Committee, and we hope that committee will have an event to plan in 2022. I want our Awards and Nominating Committee to be concerned not only about filling leadership positions but also how to bring new leaders into those positions and the leadership succession.

If you’re not on a committee, I’m sure the chairs would be happy to have more working volunteers.

In summary, I want us to be more creative and dynamic in rebranding Kiwanis as a vital organization in Jonesboro. I want us to be known for doing more things than cooking pancakes once a year.

Our new board will have a retreat early next month, during which we’ll talk about how we can reach some of these goals. But I’m going to set one goal for every person here — and I’m asking you particularly because you are the people who make things happen in this club.

Before Sept. 30, 2022, recruit and sponsor at least one new member. If we continue to leave recruiting to “someone else,” this club probably will not exist in a few years. The fact is that only a handful of us have recruited even a single new member over the past five years. So if you agree that this club’s work must go on, resolve that you will find one new member and get it done. Then you can go after another.

Thank you very much. Now on to a new year.