After 76 years, the Crescenta-Cañada Rotary Club will hold its final meeting due to lack of funds and membership
After 76 years of serving the community, the Rotary Club for La Crescenta and La Cañada Flintridge will hold its final meeting next month, its members forced to fold the group because of a lack of funds and declining membership.
Founded in 1940, the Crescenta-Cañada Rotary Club is part of the larger international service organization Rotary International. The local club has struggled with recruitment for several years, and members decided at a meeting held in July that if they could not bring in at least six new members before the end of the year, the club would disband.
They signed up only one new member.
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With 22 members currently — and with only about a dozen active — the club could not sustain itself financially with a static number of recruits, even after halving its meeting requirements. According to Darren Azarian, club president, roughly $40,000 of club savings helped subsidize group operations during the past four years.
“What people tell us is that they’re just busy. We’ve done everything we can to accommodate,” Azarian said. “Where we really need the help is our community-service activities. That’s when we need our members, not necessarily at our meetings.”
With the median age of the group members floating at around 78 years old, the members also found it more and more difficult to continue regular club activities, such as a cleanup of the Angeles Crest Highway and providing youth scholarships.
Club treasurer Joe Kroening joined the group in 1963. He followed a path set out by his father, who joined the Crescenta-Cañada Rotary Club shortly after the organization was founded.
“In those days, the social clubs were really like the fabric of the community,” Kroening said.
A noticeable lack of interest in service clubs started in the 1960s, Kroening said, when after-school activities, church groups and youth sports started to fill a similar bonding role in communities. In the same vein, Kroening said he thinks more and more people now opt to spend money on other activities rather than pay the dues required to be part of a service club.
“Younger people already have so much to do, and if you tack on service clubs — with once-a-week meetings and two or three activities a month — they just can’t do everything,” Kroening said.
The group’s final Christmas party will be held at Taylor’s Steakhouse in La Cañada at 7 p.m. on Tuesday. The party will also serve as a toy drive to benefit the Toys for Kids program sponsored by the Crescenta Valley Sheriff’s Station.
The last official Crescenta-Canada Rotary Club meeting will be on Dec. 13. At the final meeting, members will distribute club funds to various organizations they’ve supported in the past as well as make final decisions about how to proceed with pending group projects.
“I think the community is going to lose dedicated individuals who would work in the community — and they were strong, strong individuals that had a lot of sway,” Kroening said.
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Jeff Landa, jeff.landa@latimes.com
Twitter: @JeffLanda
