A new generation is discovering civic service clubs

Tyler Martin, a 23-year-old professional with a high-tech job in computers, has one part of his life that may seem retro to many: He's a member of the Civitan Club, one of the dozens of civic service clubs throughout the nation.

Tyler is the fifth generation of Martins who have joined the club. Civic clubs overall, however, have seen steadily declining memberships for the past few decades and a near dearth in younger members.

A member for six months, Martin assisted in organizing the Florence Civitan's cerebral palsy telethon, which helped raise $120,000 for United Cerebral Palsy of Northwest Alabama.

At a recent meeting, Martin was surrounded by other members of the local Civitan community where they pledged allegiance to the flag, sang a club song and listened to a presentation from the new athletic director at the University of North Alabama.

"I was probably the youngest there by at least 20 years," Martin said.

Across the country, civic service clubs that range from Civitans to Exchange, Kiwanis to Rotary, all maintain central themes: contributing to the community.

Other common themes among civic organizations across the U.S. - a trend 30 to 40 years in the making - are a declining membership and a lack of young members.

Several Shoals residents are bucking that trend, and experts say nationwide there may be a slight uptick in the number of young members at service organizations, where the typical age is 50.

Amber Moore, 24, joined the Kiwanis more than a year ago. During her college years, she was involved in campus life and was president of several organizations.

"I went (from) very involved, to graduating, to having no involvement in the community," Moore said.

She was familiar with Kiwanis from the organization's annual pancake days and from news of a handicapped accessible playground the Kiwanis built in Sheffield's Riverfront Park.

She knew a member who suggested Moore check out the club. Moore joined and said Kiwanis is a great way to network and give back to the community.

"You give and you get," she said.

Beginning in the 1960s, civic groups lost ground among many young Americans, "partly because these groups had a history of racial exclusion and also they seemed old-fashioned," said Theda Skocpol, a sociologist at Harvard University and author of "Diminished Democracy: From Membership to Management in American Civic Life," a decade-long research project into civic organizations.

"There is a little bit of a resurgence and interest in regularly getting together with people in one's community but also being part of something that has a larger presence across the country," Skocpol said.

Mike Marratzo, house manager for the Elks Lodge 820 in Florence, said that in the past few years, the majority of incoming members were 35 years old or younger.

"A lot of it is younger members have joined because parents are members," Marratzo said of the organization, formerly known as The Benevolent & Protective Order of Elks of the USA.

Beyond family traditions, members join because if the younger men work out of town, it gives their wives a place to eat and socialize in a safe environment.

Once a member joins, perhaps for social reasons, Marratzo said they are exposed to the charitable work such as its Christmas basket program for people in need and the shoe fund for children.

"If it weren't for the younger members, we wouldn't be able to do as much as we have in the past," Marratzo said.

Civic organizations formed or surged in membership after wars, such as the Civil War and both World Wars, Skocpol said.

"The wars certainly encouraged the formation of all sorts of membership groups," she said.

Older types of groups such as fraternal or women's groups brought people together from different occupations and started after the Civil War.

Most of the civic organizations we know of today formed last century in the early 1900s and 1920s, coinciding with the end of World War I. The last time civic organizations were prominent was in the 1950s during the post World War II baby boom.

Skocpol said one reason civic organizations declined is because of their professionalization in the 1970s, where local volunteers were replaced by professionals with central offices in larger cities that made the groups become heavy on administration.

"Groups would have paid staff instead of volunteers," Skocpol said.

Our general ability to choose more specifically who we socialize with has also affected civic clubs, said Andrew Perrin, a sociologist at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

"If I'm a kid growing up in a small town in 1949 and I don't particularly like the people around me, there's not a whole lot I can do about it. I have to socialize with them because that's the way the society is set up," Perrin said.

"But now I can go online and find people that are a lot like me and pick and choose who my social network is."

But cyber social networking has its limitations.

"The kind of accidental interactions, the interactions between those who are significantly different from one another, those sorts of things tend to go by the wayside," Perrin said.

"Americans in particular, but people in general, have always been in search of ways to fine tune who they have to hang out with and who they don't have to hang out with."

Communication technologies such as cell phones, e-mail and online communities such as Facebook and MySpace "perfect that desire," he said.

Also, for many experts, the claim that civic responsibility has declined may be overstated considering a large number of environmental, political and advocacy groups formed during the 1960s to the 1980s.

Also, more fragmented community-based groups focus less on community and more on a topic, as demonstrated by the World Changers, a non-geographically based Christian youth group that meets annually to provide community assistance, focusing on providing home repairs to low-income people in need.

"There's more focus on the transaction," said David Bledsoe, director of communications at Civitan International, headquartered in Birmingham.

For example, someone can join Habitat for Humanity on a building project, but not be part of a larger group, Bledsoe said. But, he stressed, "You can accomplish more as a group."

Several civic clubs around the country are trying to adapt to the challenges of living in a more fragmented, mobile and online world.

For example, members of the Ashland Elks Lodge, BPOE No. 944 in Oregon, or members of the Kiwanis Club of North Bay, Ontario, can meet on Facebook, a popular online community.

"We're looking for developing new clubs and new club structures to keep up with the changing times," said Pam Fleming, Kiwanis governor for the Alabama district.

Nationally, Kiwanis has several Internet incarnations, including one chapter in Montana with a chat room for real-time communication with other members.

Fleming said one Internet club has raised money to help build an orphanage in

Vietnam.

"Even though they don't meet together like a traditional club, they can still provide service to the community," Fleming said.

Three experimental Kiwanis clubs geared for young professionals started in Decatur, Birmingham and Mobile, where participants meet once a month.

"Their way of communicating will be much different," said Fleming, referring to the Internet and text messaging via cell phone.

Kiwanis, like some other groups, sponsors youth groups such as the Key Club and Circle Club for college students. But after graduation, there's a gap, Fleming said.

In the end, community volunteering, a major function of civic clubs, has increased in the past few years and may be shifting to more project- or issue-based volunteering.

In 2007, nearly 61 million Americans volunteered in their communities with 8.1 billion hours of service valued at more than $158 billion, according to the Volunteering in America report released last Monday by the Corporation for National and Community Service.

Nationally, volunteering fell for the second year in a row, but since 2002, one million more Americans became volunteers. The number of volunteers peaked in 2005 and stabilized by 2006.

The majority of national volunteering, 35.7 percent, came from religious organizations compared with 6 percent from civic

organizations.

Overall volunteering across the U.S. had three major growth areas: corporate or non-profit sponsored volunteering from employees, the baby boomer population that is starting to retire, and youth volunteering - many high schools and colleges require volunteering from students as a graduation requirement, according to LaVerne Campbell, director of volunteer services at Volunteers of America, a national non-profit, spiritually-based community organization.

"As kids are getting involved in youth activities, it becomes a part of their daily life - many become very committed to volunteering," Campbell said.

This view is shared by

Perrin.

"More people are getting engaged, getting involved in smaller, less organized, more informal kinds of civic activities than they were before," Perrin said.

"So it's more a decline in these particular kinds of organizations than it is of civic participation altogether."

Trevor Stokes can be reached at 740-5728 or trevor.stokes@TimesDaily.com.