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One Day: a celebration of family service

Service—the very heart of Kiwanis—is what Kiwanians do best. And making the hands-on experience more gratifying is performing service in the true spirit of camaraderie. Whether it’s the Kiwanis family in Wyoming Area, Pennsylvania, teaming up for a “breakfast with Santa” fundraiser or the Westlake, Ohio, Kiwanis family donning aprons and oven mitts for a pancake breakfast, joining forces in service is the perfect recipe for bolstering Kiwanis presence in the community.

A Kiwanian and K-Kids members sort boxed food donated during a Builders Club and K-Kids food drive.

A member of the Kiwanis Club of Westminster, California, gently paints the face of a young girl who is a cancer patient at the Children’s Hospital of Orange County, California, part of a division-wide service project.

A Kiwanian and K-Kids members sort boxed food donated during a Builders Club and K-Kids food drive.

Imagine the worldwide impact, then, of Kiwanis-family members—Kiwanians, Kiwanis Juniors, Key Clubbers, Circle K and Aktion Club members, Builders, and K-Kids—serving together for one full day. That’s the impetus behind Kiwanis One Day: One Way, One Day, One K.

Set for April 7, 2007, Kiwanis One Day unites Kiwanis clubs with the rest of the Kiwanis family for a day of service like none other. With more than 600,000 Kiwanis-family members giving just a few hours each, more than 1 million service hours would be logged around the world on Kiwanis One Day, underscoring the magnitude of what the family can accomplish.

“Our collective caring hands will reach out to make history as one positive force for change,” says International President Nelson Tucker, one of the driving forces behind the special day of service.

Kiwanis One Day is modeled after the California-Nevada-Hawaii District’s “Total K Day,” launched during the 1999-2000 administrative year by then-governor Terri Neumann.

“As governor-elect, I met with the sponsored youth administrators,” Terri recalls. “Our topic was uniting the Kiwanis family within our district. During our discussion, we realized that we do not typically do service projects together. Sure, we invited (our sponsored youth) to our fundraisers to bus tables and do other chores, and then we paid them a stipend for their convention expenses. But we did not work hand-in-hand on projects, an ideal way to show our sponsored youth how Kiwanians enjoy the benefits that come from community service—and the fun we have too!

“So we decided to give them a day with just that focus.”

The success of the initial Total K Day, Terri notes, was beyond expectations. About 7,136 participants from 354 Kiwanis clubs and 291 sponsored youth clubs logged more than 32,782 hours participating in service projects on the same day.

“The event was so successful,” Terri says, “our district House of Delegates voted unanimously to make Total K an annual event. To date, our district alone has contributed nearly 115,000 service hours working as a Total K Family.”

Projects undertaken during Total K Days typically have included blood drives; book drives; cleanup and maintenance at sports parks; cleaning up at low-income housing sites, mobile home parks, city streets and roads, schools and churches, cemeteries, beaches, and campgrounds; reading to children; painting public buildings; constructing park benches and tables; health fairs; and grocery shopping for senior citizens.

Communities obviously have benefited from Total K days, but Terri believes the benefits for the district also have been many, including the “sense of oneness” cultivated. She believes the benefits will be realized on a much larger scale because of the Kiwanis One Day initiative.

“To me, Kiwanis One Day is important to our Kiwanis family,” Terry explains, “because it unites our efforts to make significant contributions to our community; the scope of these larger projects makes publicity much easier to obtain and more inclusive of our organization; the public awareness of this day of service actually brings in new members—it has for us and, in one case, brought about the formation of a new club; and working together with our sponsored programs clubs reinforces our organization’s mission of serving the children of the world.”

And, Terri adds, like Total K Day, Kiwanis One Day will dispel some of the perceptions members of Service Leadership Program clubs have about Kiwanians.

“They see we also have fun performing service,” Terri explains. “I think this may go a long way in keeping our sponsored members in the Kiwanis family.”

Clubs are encouraged to take part in this momentous event by following the step-by-step game plan: form a committee, select a project, form subcommittees, develop marketing and public relations campaigns, and report your club’s success to Kiwanis International via e-mail.