September 2003

Dear Brother Knights,

Welcome to the 2003 – 04 Columbian year. I have been fortunate enough to be able to be in contact with many of you through various means throughout the summer, so I know that while most of us were very busy, we all enjoyed the summer and the special gifts that God brings us through it.
Now unfortunately, the leaves are starting to turn, the weather is showing signs of dropping, and school is back in. But that is only unfortunate as a matter of perspective I think. I find that as fall rolls around, life seems to return to a normal pattern for me and I can look forward to new things like new shows, new hockey season, and of course our new Columbian year.
At this time, I would very much like to make a special invitation to you all, to attend out first general meeting of the year. When I say “all”, I in fact mean that this first meeting of the year is being planned out to be an open house style of meeting. Normally in September we make a Notice of Motion to accept our new years budget. As you may well know, a Notice of Motion is tabled for one month until the next general meeting without discussion on the motion itself until then. In which case, we are left without the means to use the new budget for one more month as well. So we felt that rather than just waste an evening on five to ten minutes of that, we would also include a large program meeting for anyone in the council, our families, or the church to attend and be able to take part in.
So we will be spending several minutes in the chambers placing the Notice of Motion, and then we will proceed down to the church basement to join those in attendance and welcome any input, suggestions, or even criticisms that may be out there for us. I hope that this is well received by you all, and as well by those who may come out to take part in it.
I have found it has become an issue with me to discover exactly what we as a service club mean annually to our church and community. I wanted to be able to publish for you the items that we submit to Supreme on our Fraternal Survey. This is a form that we are required to send in each year to show that we are contributing to the elements of our community required of us as a service club. It also gives Supreme it’s handy little sets of statistics to show around and display to those who are interested, just what an impact our order has on not only Catholics, but on life in general. Unfortunately I didn’t come to the computer prepared with the tools I needed to do this. But I really do think that it might be of interest to you all to see just what a years worth of our volunteering adds up to on paper. I find it very interesting, and I am anything but a paperwork/numbers kind of guy. But it really is an eye opener to see hundreds of hours of volunteer service and literally thousands of dollars of charity work, all contributed by you and me. Just a bunch of normal guys and their families, trying to follow God through our faith, with the aid of our organization. I hope to be able to publish the fraternal survey for you in one of this year’s newsletters. I think that it should me something that means far more to us, than it ever should to someone in New Haven anyway.
All of this applies directly to how we want to approach the coming year. Many of our efforts have become traditional to us, but somehow they risk losing their potency if all it turns out to be is a knee-jerk reaction to the same old thing. For example, we donate bibles and rosaries to the elementary classes each year. I have tried to imagine just how proud I would have felt to have been involved with the first donation of this program and what it would have meant to me as a member of our council that we had been able to help God in this way with the children. This is an important item for the classes each year and just as they have come to depend on this, we have come to accept it as a kind of given event. I have to think that it now has a little bit less impact to us as members than it used to when it was fresh and new.
Now there is nothing wrong with the program, or how it is implemented. The problem is that it doesn’t seem like the blessing that it used to. Why does that matter? It matters because we should try to remember just how special it is that we are able to do this in the first place. We need to see it as a yearly success and not just something that we have always done. Because in point of fact it isn’t something that we have always just done, and it does have impact on the children of our community, their teachers, their parents, and ultimately I think that handing someone their own Bible is like giving them a lit fireworks. Depending on how long of a fuse God has placed on it, it is bound to go off in one way or another eventually. And when it does, everything changes, but we all know that.
So what are we missing then in a program like this? I think that it is the recognition of its impact. Or maybe it is that spark of pride that you get from knowing that you have done something good and that it will make a difference. Why is that? In my mind it is because it is not new and exciting. It is established and therefore there is no risk, opportunity, questions, or anything that contribute to our sense of accomplishment. It is just an annual vote to spend a budgeted amount on something that we are expecting to be the same thing as last year. In fact, the most excitement that I got out of this program was when we had to deal with courier charges and changing it from delivery to pick up in the future. This is a very worthwhile program, and I would hope that we could all somehow find it within ourselves to see it from where we were when it was new to help make it more meaningful. That would really apply to all the different things that we do annually as established actions that we budget for.
And so we look for new things to bring the old spark of pride back. The truth of the matter is that as I have mentioned above, we have made many donations to many groups and causes, and we should be very proud of that. The fact that some of these have become annual donations is truly one sign of our many great successes as a council. And as such we have taken what we are blessed with, and stretched it out to include a great many things. So to create new items in the budget or find new ways to bring some spark back to an old program has proven to be an exercise in creativity. We approached last year’s programs with the knowledge that there were new directors in each program, and that most of our budget had been previously spoken for in regards to these annual donations and activities. So the plan was to try to take a little and make it go further than ever before. With guidelines like “A program activity that is self-sufficient financially is a successful program that can operate with or without the help of our AG regulated council budget” we began to see things change and evolve a bit.
One example of something that was introduced last year in this mindset was the family bowling. I think that for the first time we applied a $2 charge to the attendance of this. Now I didn’t think that $2 was very much, and it created a bit of room in the family program budget to tackle more things as well.
But what we learned from the membership is this. Many of our members attend and work as volunteers for us to help create the money that goes into the budget. Mainly this applies to bingo workers, but there are other things as well, for example the highly successful hockey camp that we put on each year. Now as a result of the work put in by the members, it is like a sign of appreciation to them when they are able to attend something like the family bowling and be covered by the council. It is because we don’t get to see most of the money that we work so hard to make, that these things have become fairly important.
Our intention last year was not to take more from the membership by charging a fee for the bowling. In fact that was our attempt to offer more things to more of the membership. It may take some ironing out, but that will still be a focus for the coming year. But now we are a little more sensitive to the issue of showing the membership that we do in fact appreciate their efforts. This will become a tough line to draw though as there are many different opinions as to what qualifies as something that should be completely covered by the council and what doesn’t. I invite you to speak out on this issue at any time to me, or any of the other program or executive members, in order to help keep us all moving in a productive and proper direction.

We are reviving the fraternalism, to an extent, within our council. When I say that you should take it with a grain of salt, and remember that I am still a relatively new face to the council after all. I am not trying to suggest that there has been some kind of fraternalism death or absence. As a matter of fact, what I mean by this is that we are putting fraternalism in our sights as a major target for the council as opposed to leaving it as a happy coincidence or side effect of things that we are doing. It is a fact that we join for many different reasons, but what keeps us coming back is our level of interest. That will dictate our involvement, our dedication, our donation of time, and the quality of it all. If we are not interested, then we go out and join the Elks or maybe get hockey tickets instead, but we won’t be wasting our time in the Knights if it isn’t interesting. In order to make things interesting and also to achieve the goal of showing our appreciation to the membership, the program directors are going to try to come up with ways to get most of you out to one thing or another. Obviously interesting is a relative term and hopping a bus to Calgary to challenge another council to a ballgame, isn’t everyone’s idea of fun. So what we are going to need from you are the ideas and drive to follow them up. What is interesting to you? Tours, challenges, creating and organizing new things, guest speakers, game nights… What is interesting to you?
You may cringe at this thought, but working a Bingo is a great fraternal activity. I know that it’s long, smoky, demanding and so on, and I also know that you’ve heard it all before about helping out at bingos, but really, it is rich in getting to know other guys, working together (or even against each other, Troy) to achieve a common goal, and then it is followed up with a volunteers dinner, usually at Kosmos where you can all sit together and shoot the bull while you chew the fat. I find that while working a bingo usually wipes me out, I have a lot of fun doing it. Now coming from the Bingo captain’s point of view, it sometimes is not that easy going. Usually the hardest part of that guy’s job is phoning up council members to help and getting 90% rejection. It is sad to say that it is harder to get guys to come out and work a bingo, than it is to actually work the bingo itself.
I have two requests of you as members of the council. One is that you consider volunteering to work at least one bingo a year for the council, and that you phone your bingo captain up and book yourself. I don’t think that one bingo is too much to ask of most guys. There are guys who are at virtually every one of our bingos, in the name of maintaining our councils budget, spending habits and even our licenses to do so, which can be forfeited by something as trivial as not having enough guys show up to work a bingo one night.
My second request is this. We are in the position now where one of our bingo captains is waiting to step down and be replaced, but as of yet we have not been able to find someone to take his place. It takes all kinds of people to make up a council of the Knights of Columbus, and as such I would very much like to see more different people taking the reigns on different projects or committee’s so that other guys don’t have to double up on these things in order to keep things moving. I try to convey this message to new members who are nervous to step up and take something on. This group is full of people who each have their own ideas and opinions on what should and shouldn’t be done, and you must be one of them. That makes you qualified to bring your ideas and efforts up in order to make new things happen. Don’t be afraid to screw up. Be afraid of not ever trying. Having said that, there are many openings waiting for any of you who have ideas or interests in something that may or may not be going on, the bingo captain is one of them. I might even consider creating an elected committee of three guys to take this task on each year, but that remains to be seen I guess. In any case, please bring yourself to the council and don’t just expect the council to bring itself to you. There is lot’s of opportunity out there for us, we just need to take the wheel and invite people to come along.
I guess that by making this pitch to you all, I am inviting you to also bring your beefs to the council, and one of those may be the bingos. If you have strong feelings about the bingos, then by all means stand up for that, but don’t just do it to get out of working them. Something that really gets to me is a guy who comes up after a meeting is over and then contributes something important to an issue that was dealt with earlier. When you stand up to speak at a meeting, the floor is yours exclusively until you are done, and that is your right. Just as another guy has the right to disagree with you, or support your thoughts when the floor is his to do so. Please come to the meetings and stand up for your opinions. We are all Catholic men and we are supposed to be hearing all sides possible to an issue before we need to deal with it. So to you I say this. Bring it. Hear it. Say it. Share it, and understand it.

At the end of last year, we held our councils 25th anniversary dinner. Many hands were involved in putting that event together and making it as big of a success as it was. I would like to thank them all again and also I would like to remind you that we have printed an anniversary yearbook for the council. There should be enough for each member to have his own copy, and they are all in the chambers. Please come and get your copy. As well we have gotten some council golf shirts made up at the cost of $40 each. If you are interested, please see Richard Yoner about purchasing them. Thanks to Richard, Mike, and Dennis for getting these things all fixed up for us. Also thanks go out to Greg for cooking, Mitch for being an MC, and to Darren, Laurie and Nancy for their immense planning and organizational skills. I don’t think that any of you would disagree with me when I say that I am far too slow and aloof to get something like that worked out and on the go.
Also at that dinner, we had a donation bowl and we raffled off a drawing, both of which were to raise money to donate to a fundraiser established by one of our members and a friend of his. Bro Joe Justus and his friend facilitated a bike trek to raise money for Pediatric lung research. Initially our council made a $200 donation to this effort from our bingo account, but at our dinner I am proud to say that we were able to raise another $260 that I was blessed to be able to donate to them on the morning of August 20th in Leduc before they headed off to Red Deer. While the donations are still coming in to them in the mail and such, the bike trek that these two men worked so hard on, was able to well clear $10,000, to be donated to the Alberta Lung Association. Joe has mentioned to me how supportive the Knights of Columbus in general has been to them, at a time of year when most service clubs were on a break. While they came short of their goal, they are both grateful and happy to be able to have been as successful as they were with the project. So give Joe your congratulations when you see him next, on a job well done.

Speaking of jobs well done, the hockey school committee came through with flying colours again this year. They have represented our council and the order incredibly well again this year. It is a tremendous amount of work and planning to get this moving and working, and I welcome your support for them for next year. They will be looking for more hands again to help with the legwork I’m sure. Thanks to those guys for putting on another highly successful hockey camp with the Golden Bears.

So remember this as the year goes by. We reap what we sow.

Vivat Jesus,
Chris

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