People

A new Kiwanian helps build
a new Kiwanis International

Erica Hauck thought she would pass out. She stood at her seat, not at the podium, to speak to the governor and the district’s board of directors.

Kiwanis in the inner city takes a different model than in suburban areas, says Erica Hauck. Downtown workers commute from outside the city, but the homeless and the needs are still there every night, every weekend, she says.

She had exactly five minut5es to save Division 1 from being shut down in the California-Nevada-Hawaii District.

Home to the historic 1917 Kiwanis Club of Los Angeles—Kiwanis International’s 67th club—the urban division had dwindled over time, and the board already had voted to close it. Erica had just learned of the fate a few weeks prior and was told there was nothing she could do about it.

A marketing and business-development executive, she walked in to the board meeting bearing a professional marketing plan to grow the division and gave copies to her 44 fellow directors.

Erica had been a Kiwanis member for three years and was then a brand-new lieutenant governor. There was new momentum with younger members joining the area clubs, and she was passionate about saving the division.

And besides, there was a little four-year-old homeless boy named Willy in downtown Los Angeles who needed Kiwanis.

“I wanted the board to believe in Kiwanis as much as I believe in Kiwanis,” she says. Some people didn’t think Division 1 could be revived. Some spoke against keeping Division 1 alive.

“But I was so passionate about seeing Kiwanis become more relevant to urban communities,” Erica says. “It wasn’t time to give up on this division. There were so many opportunities, and we hadn’t yet tapped into the next generation of Kiwanis.”

The board gave her a chance: She had one year to either open two new club s or add 120 members.

Her plan: Enlist help from other Kiwanians, train members to build and revitalize clubs, identify specific places to open clubs, craft compelling projects to unite the division, articulate what would attract busy urban professionals to community service, and enlist help from the district’s marketing committee.

Six months later, in February 2005, her division had opened clubs in Beverly Hills and Fairfax, and it had added dozens of members.

But the work wasn’t done. Division 1 has since added two more clubs: one in Crenshaw in the South Central area of Los Angeles, and one in Mid-Wilshire, which opened in February. It’s also added a Key Club, with another on the way.

Erica joined Kiwanis in 2001. She had been taking leftover food from her company’s lunches and giving it to homeless people on Skid Row a block from her downtown Los Angeles office. Camille Goulet, a friend who also worked in downtown, took note and invited Rica to a Kiwanis meeting.

They seemed like rally good people, Erica thought.

Camille invited Erica to go with the Kiwanis club the following week to read to children in a downtown homeless shelter. A little boy named Willy latched on to her. “He wanted to hold my hand, to sit on my lap. He wanted me to read to him. He just needed attention so badly,” Erica recalls. “He was my Kiwanis moment.” She wasn’t even a member yet.

Perhaps if it weren’t for Willy, there would be no Division 1 today.

“What drives my passion is that there are a lot of little Willies running around LA,” says Erica. “If Division 1 went away, there would be fewer chances for these kids’ lives to be touched. It’s our duty.”—Lynn Seeden