No more roast beef sandwiches, as some clubs end struggle to staff Lakefair booths

Lakefair kicked off Wednesday, complete with the usual attractions — a ferris wheel, musical acts, and “gut bombs” galore.

But this year, some food-row favorites are conspicuously absent.

Because of changing priorities and difficulties staffing a large event like Lakefair, the Olympia Kiwanis Club, which sold crowd-favorite roast beef sandwiches, and the Tumwater Rotary Club, known for their corn dogs, didn’t roll out their food carts this year.

The decision signals a shift in the way service groups like Kiwanis and Rotary operate.

“All clubs are struggling not just to get new members, but to maintain membership," said Bill McCarthy, who has been a member of the Tumwater Rotary Club for 45 years. "It's kind of a changing world, I guess."

Across the country, the story is the same: Membership in service groups is declining. Rotary membership nationwide has declined from about 346,000 in 2011 to 330,000 in 2016, according to Brian King, director of membership development for Rotary International.

Local groups have been comparatively successful in recent years. The Tumwater Rotary has seen membership grow to 37 members from 33 in the past year. The Olympia Kiwanis Club has maintained about 110 members for years, according to Olympia Kiwanis Club President Mark Couey, although he noted that’s deceptively positive, considering population growth in the area.

“I think it’s a testament to the civic-mindedness of the folks in our area,” Couey said. “We’re blessed to have a lot of really good people in our community that care.”

It’s the focus on attracting and retaining members that prompted the Rotary’s decision to skip Lakefair this year.

To run its Lakefair booth, the Rotary needed 10 members working at a time, in three four-hour shifts, for five days in a row. That’s a difficult feat for a group with less than 40 members, especially on weekdays when many members work. Even if every member worked a 12-hour day, it wouldn’t be enough to fill out the shifts.

“It just got to the point where the membership is becoming exhausted,” McCarthy said. “It kind of outgrew us.”

The Kiwanis booth was similarly demanding, and the club struggled to fill its shifts despite being nearly triple the size of the Rotary.

The clubs turned to soliciting family members and teens to volunteer in the booth, but it was still too much.

“Without them, we would’ve probably had to come to this decision much earlier,” Couey said.

McCarthy said there has been a shift in the way members view service groups, especially as younger generations join the fold. There’s more of a focus on projects with faster results, and some members aren’t as willing to spend significant amounts of time on service projects, especially if they work full-time.

That makes a large, time-intensive event like Lakefair undesirable.

“It’s a different world,” McCarthy said. “People don't want to make that commitment to meetings or specific projects."

But rather than faulting members for their different approach to the club, the Rotary wants to cater to it.

Instead of taking on longer-term events like Lakefair, the club plans to switch to fundraisers that require less time from members. This year, the club’s main fundraiser will be a Golf Ball Drop at Tumwater Artesian Brewfest: a raffle-style event that simply requires members to sell tickets or work a booth at the one-day festival.

“We're trying to find projects that people don't have to put that much time into,” McCarthy said.

The Kiwanis Club is shifting its focus toward projects with flexible hours and a stronger community impact, like their Food Bank Garden, which provided over 33,000 pounds of vegetables to the Thurston County Food Bank last year. And they will still hold Olympia Harbor Days, a three-day festival over Labor Day Weekend.

“Our focus is about serving the community and serving the children in the community, and we fully intend to do that in other ways,” Couey said.

Despite the clubs’ willingness to adapt, leaving Lakefair will take some getting used to.

McCarthy has volunteered at the Rotary’s Lakefair booth for 48 years — since the booth was “literally a plywood box” that they strapped to a trailer and hauled down to the fairgrounds.

He still plans to attend Lakefair, but he’ll miss chatting with people who go out of their way to come to the booth and say hi.

“I'm gonna miss seeing everybody that I've known over the last 40 or 50 years,” McCarthy said. “It’s a big change.”

This story was originally published July 14, 2017 at 4:17 AM with the headline "No more roast beef sandwiches, as some clubs end struggle to staff Lakefair booths."