Dwindling membership cited as Rotary Club in Snohomish disbands

SNOHOMISH — The Rotary Club here is disbanding after more than three decades of service.

Like many traditional service clubs, Snohomish Rotary has struggled for years to retain members and get new people to sign up. By 2015, the club had only 13 Rotarians.

“Membership got to the point where we weren’t effective in the projects we wanted to do,” Snohomish Rotary President Kendra Trachta said. “Our purpose is to serve in our communities and serve internationally.”

Fewer members means each person has to take on more work. With many aging members in the group, the labor required to complete projects became increasingly difficult, Trachta said.

Adding to the challenge, many Snohomish residents who are in Rotary have joined clubs in the cities where they work, said Bob Knight, a 17-year member. The club’s weekly 7 a.m. meetings were not conducive to a commuter’s schedule. So after 33 years, the club decided to call it quits.

“Sometimes you need to close something down, let some time pass and see what happens,” said Knight, 82.

Snohomish Rotary is not alone in facing challenges with membership. Millennials — people born in the early 1980s and younger — are particularly difficult to recruit for a service club, said Merle Kirkley, the president-elect of the Snohomish Lions Club.

“When I was young, it was just something you did,” said Kirkley, 74. “You were part of a community and you served where you lived.”

The Snohomish Lions, which has about 35 members, has tried using Facebook and changing its evening meeting time to noon to attract new, younger people. But, Kirkley said, it didn’t help much.

Although volunteerism does seem to be changing, it isn’t going away, said Carol Robinson, who serves children and teens with the Snohomish Education Foundation and as a local Girl Scout leader.

“The younger set is not really joining the old-guard clubs,” Robinson said. “They’re finding their own ways.”

Robinson said her daughter, Katherine, 22, works on volunteer projects but has not committed to a traditional service club. Focusing on specific projects instead of joining groups such as the Lions, Kiwanis and Rotary is becoming more common among young people, Robinson said.

Still, Kirkley said, he hopes seeing the difference groups have made collectively in Snohomish will inspire Millennials to join.

“Service clubs are really at the heart of America,” he said. “I don’t want to lose that.”

Snohomish Rotary isn’t closing without leaving a mark on the community. For years, members sold snow cones to pay for student scholarships. The club also raised money to build the Snohomish Skate Park.

“One of the gifts Snohomish Rotary has given to the community is advocating for things to get done,” said Knight, the club’s spokesman.

The group has held an annual berry sale every year since 1989 to raise money for service work. Pat Knight, the wife of Bob Knight and the sale’s organizer since the early 1990s, said people looked forward it.

“We got phone calls from people who were sad we weren’t doing it any more,” said Knight, 80.

Rotary also provided the money for a Snohomish librarian to retrofit an old school bus into a rolling library. It delivers books to kids in low-income neighborhoods during the summer. Snohomish Rotary will donate all of its remaining money, about $5,500, to keep the bus rolling.

Trachta, the outgoing president, said she appreciated how welcoming Snohomish Rotarians were when she moved to the area four years ago to work as deputy director for Sno-Isle Libraries.

“When I was growing up, they were very much a group for businessmen,” Trachta, 47, said. “Now, people join to make the world a better place.”

Women weren’t allowed to join Rotary until 1988. Vicki Stevens-Karr was the first woman to join the Snohomish club and among the first female Rotarians in the state. At the time, Stevens-Karr worked in the male-dominated livestock business at the Britton Brothers Auction.

“They had to find a woman tough enough” to join, she said. “The men, and their jokes, were really hard on me. … But I had to let it roll off because I was in a man’s world.”

Stevens-Karr and Kathy Watanabe, who became the club’s first female president in 1997, were among the few women in Rotary for years. But by 2015, the women outnumbered the men and many took on leadership roles.

Now, some of the experienced volunteers from Snohomish Rotary are finding new ways to serve.

Greg Starup, president of Monroe Rotary, said two Snohomish members have joined his group. It has 34 people, half of whom are younger than 50.

Starup said it takes a concerted effort to attract and retain enough people to maintain a club.

“We’re asking for their money and their time,” he said. “It has to be fun and it has to be rewarding.”

Amy Nile: 425-339-3192; anile@heraldnet.com. Twitter: @AmyNileReports.