Programs

K-Kids is the elementary school branch of the Kiwanis family. Members elect their own officers, choose their own projects, and run them with a Kiwanis adviser standing beside them rather than in front of them.

The projects are deliberately small enough to finish: a food drive, cards for a nursing home, a clean-up at the school. What sticks is not the project. It is the habit - that when you see something that needs doing, you are someone who can do it.

Builders Club is the middle school branch of the Kiwanis family, and it lands at exactly the age when young people are working out what kind of person they intend to be.

Members run their own club. They elect officers, hold their own meetings, decide what the club takes on, and answer for how it goes. Kiwanians advise, drive, and turn up - but the club belongs to the members. Many carry straight on into Key Club in high school.

Key Club is the oldest and largest service program for high school students anywhere, and for a lot of members it is the first thing they have ever run themselves.

Members lead their own club, plan their own service, and account for it to their peers. Along the way they pick up the ordinary, unglamorous skills that make service actually happen: running a meeting, keeping a budget, asking for help, following through after the novelty has worn off.

Colleges notice Key Club. What matters more is that the habit tends to outlast school.

Terrific Kids recognizes students for the effort they put in rather than the marks that come out.

Teachers choose the students, and the criteria are theirs to set - a child who has turned their attitude around, who helps without being asked, who kept going at something hard.

Recognizing effort rather than raw ability reaches the children who rarely make it onto an honour roll, and they are frequently the ones for whom it matters most.

For five years the Claus Mission has been putting Santa where children can actually reach him, and the Kiwanis Club of the Lake Region is proud to be the partnership that makes it possible.

It works on three fronts. Santa goes out into the community, visiting neighborhoods, schools and events rather than waiting behind a rope in a shopping center. Children write to him, and every letter gets an answer, addressed to that child by name. And the Claus workshop puts gifts under trees in homes where there would otherwise not have been any.

The numbers, over five years:

More than 2,000 children visited, at over 30 locations.
More than 1,000 children who wrote to Claus and received a letter back.
More than 150 families whose Christmas came out of the Claus workshop.

Behind each of those figures is an ordinary evening: someone in a suit in a cold parking lot, someone at a kitchen table answering letters in careful handwriting, someone wrapping presents for a family they will never meet. None of it is complicated. It just has to actually happen, every year, and somebody has to make sure it does.

The Mission runs through November and December. If you would like to help - driving, wrapping, answering letters, or donating a gift - get in touch and we will find you a job.

Every spring the club awards scholarships to graduating seniors from the Lake Region heading on to college or trade school.

The money comes from the year the club has just spent working: the concession stand on Friday nights, the cornhole boards, the fish fry, the funnel cakes at the festival. Every dollar handed to a student was raised by somebody standing behind a table in the heat.

Trade school counts the same as university. A student going to weld, wire houses, cut hair or fix diesel engines is building the same kind of future as one going to Gainesville, and the club has never seen a reason to treat those differently.

Applications open in the new year and close in the spring. There is no essay contest to win and no expectation that a student be top of their class. The club is looking for young people who are going somewhere and could use a hand getting there.

Watch the Scholarships page for this year's dates and the application form.

Several times a year the club puts American flags up along Lawrence Boulevard, and takes them down again afterward.

They are American made. That was a deliberate choice and it costs more, but a flag flown to honor this country ought to have been made in it. The club buys them that way and replaces them when they wear.

The work itself is early mornings. A handful of members meet before the heat, work their way down the boulevard setting the flags in their holders, and come back a few days later to take them in, fold them, and put them away for next time. It is not difficult and it does not take long, but it only happens because somebody turns up.

If you have driven down Lawrence Boulevard on a holiday weekend and thought the town looked right, this is why.

More hands make it quicker. If you would like to be on the list for the next one, get in touch.

Both of the parades that mark the year here - the Fourth of July and Christmas - are Kiwanis parades from start to finish. The club pulls the permits, takes the applications, sets the line-up, judges the entries, orders the trophies, and announces the parade as it goes by.

That is months of work for a morning of parade. It starts with paperwork and phone calls long before anyone else is thinking about it, and it ends with somebody handing out trophies and somebody else at the microphone.

Nothing is sold and nothing is collected. The club does it because a parade is one of the few things that brings the whole town to the same curb at the same time, and somebody has to make it happen.

The flags along the boulevard go up before the Fourth and come down again afterwards. That is club work too.

If you want to help put one on, we can always use hands.

Easter morning at Keystone Beach, 6:30 in the morning, before the sun is up.

People arrive in the dark. Some bring folding chairs, most bring a coat, and a few bring children who did not entirely agree to this. The service is short. By the time it ends the sun is up over the water and everyone goes home to their families for the rest of the day.

The Kiwanis Club of the Lake Region hosts it, and it belongs to the whole community. There is no admission, no collection, and no expectation that you belong to any particular church or to any church at all. If you want to stand on a beach at sunrise on Easter morning, you are welcome.

It is one of the few things the club does that asks nothing of anybody. No fundraising, no sign-up sheet, no volunteers needed beyond the handful who set up the sound and get there early. It is simply a thing the club puts on for the place it belongs to, once a year, and has done for a long time.

Watch the calendar for next year's date and time.