Service meetings do double duty


Cross-country relay restocks library shelves
You say pancakes, they say poffertjes
Service meetings do double duty
All this and service too

Service meetings do double duty

Call it a meeting with a side order of service—or service project with a club meeting on the side. Either way, if you want to put a twist in your club’s routine, try turning a meeting into a service setting.

Kiwanis members tie no-sew blankets during a meeting to donate to Project Linus. “Service meetings” are a great way to add impact to a guest speaker’s cause or organization, provide a hands-on entertainment factor, and leave members with a renewed sense of service accomplishment.

And, if your meetings have gotten a little, well, stale, a service meeting can be just the perfect pick-me-up for your club.

To stage a service meeting, select a project members can either do together during a portion of the meeting or that members can do individually with their hands—without being distracted—throughout the meeting. It’s also a good idea to align a simple project with a guest speaker.

One easy service-meeting project, for example, is having members tie pre-cut no-sew blankets to donate to an organization serving children, such as Project Linus. After brief instructions, members work individually or in pairs tying the blanket fringes, and the meeting’s regular agenda proceeds. The guest speaker might be a representative from Project Linus, who talks about the child blanket recipients and what kind of impact the blankets will make in their lives. Because each blanket takes less than an hour to tie, the meeting concludes with the finished blankets being presented to the guest speaker.