Shelburne & Area Lions Club Fundraiser

For more than 6 decades, the Shelburne & Area Lions Club has been an active and important part of our great community. For the past 60 plus years, we have worked to serve the people of Shelburne with dedication, joy, and pride.

Lions International is a non-profit organization. As such, any money that we realize, through donations or gifts, or through club fundraising events and projects must be used in service to members of our community. We are, of course, permitted the necessary funds to maintain our building (electricity, heating oil, etc.) but once those bills are paid, any remaining revenue must be used for community service purposes only, This is a rule that our club strictly adheres to.

The Shelburne & Area Lions Club provides many essential services to members of our community. Most of these things are common knowledge but there are also many, many other things that are done quietly and with discretion.

I share some of those services with you now, not for recognition or accolades, but to offer a better understanding of what we do, for those who may not be familiar with our organization.

***We purchase eyeglasses for anyone who requires corrective lenses but can not afford them.
***We provide groceries to people and families who are struggling to put food on the table. 
***We have a collection of medical equipment (wheelchairs, hospital beds, etc), that we lend to anyone who needs it, free of charge, for as long as needed.
***We offer the use of our hall as well as catering services for funeral receptions, free of charge.
***We rent our hall to members of the community and groups for personal/private fundraising events. 
***We rent our hall to community members and groups for personal/private functions such as weddings and parties. 
***We offer catering services to events hosted at our hall. 
***Our building is provided free of charge to other non-profit groups and organizations.
***We have a Fire Relief Fund, through which we make monetary and material donations to victims of house fires. 
***We raise funds for the purchase and training of service dogs to be provided free of charge to people who need them.
***The Shelburne Lions Hall is Shelburne’s only Designated Emergency Building. 
***The Lions Cavalcade For Diabetes provides life-saving equipment like insulin pumps for children with diabetes, whose family can not afford them. 
***We provide transportation, to and from out of town medical appointments for seniors and other residents who have no other means of travel. 
***We donate to several charities, including The Heart & Stroke Foundation, The Canadian Diabetes Association, and Disaster Relief. 
***And finally, our biggest and arguably our most important project, our Annual Christmas Giving Tree & Adopt-A-Family Project. This incredible project has been an overwhelming success for many years and it only continues to grow. Through the amazing generosity of local businesses and groups, residents and private donors, we are able to make the holidays happy for dozens and dozens of local children and their families who need a little extra help. It is our most successful and beloved project.

As a club, we truly believe that these and other services we provide are vital to our community. The Shelburne & Area Lions Club is our community’s only public service club.

Which brings me to the matter at the heart of this letter.

Winter is always a challenge for the Shelburne & Area Lions Club. Due to the inclement. weather and the holidays, we host fewer functions and those we do host see a reduced attendance. This makes it very difficult to maintain our building expenses and contribute to the community.

Last fall, we were honored and ecstatic to receive an incredible donation of $10 000.00 on behalf of 100 Women For Change, an exceptional group of ladies whose objective, like ours, is to make their community a better place. This gift could not have come at a better time, Our building’s roof was leaking and with winter coming on, it was quickly becoming an emergency situation. We used the money to purchase roofing materials and hired a contractor to use those materials to do the repairs.

Unfortunately, we greatly under-estimated what the total cost of the repairs would be. The total cost of the contractor’s work came to nearly double the amount of the $10 000.00 donation.

This has resulted in a financial crisis for our club. Our resources have been depleted and the possibility of losing the Shelburne & Area Lions Club is very real.

We are now, humbly, reaching out to our community and asking for your help. We believe that our presence here is an important, beneficial part of Shelburne and to lose our club would mean a terrible loss to this community and the people we help every day. It is a truly heartbreaking prospect to those of us who care so much about what we do.

We are actively trying to plan fundraising events to host throughout the rest of the year but we simply can not do this alone.

If you have an idea for a fundraising event, we would love to hear it. If you want to volunteer your time, we can take all the help we can get. Or, if you would like to make a donation, every dollar is appreciated.

It is a wonderful thing to live in a place where you know that whatever misfortune may befall you, there are people willing to come together and help. We are a great group of people who volunteer our time in service to others because we love what we do and we genuinely care about this place and its people and we believe in community spirit, growth, and unity.

Thank you for your time.

Sincerely,
J. Milani
On behalf of the Shelburne & Area Lions Club,
March 2019