The Forbes and District Lions Club have been operating in Forbes since 2006. All of us are hard at work helping Forbes people, young and old.

We have a problem! Unlike many Lions Clubs in Australia, the majority of our members still work.

This is wonderful for the Lions Club in general and our President, Richard Eggleston, Our Secretary, Gayle Williams, Our Vice President Aidan Clarke and our Treasurer Lanelle Dukes Rankmore are all in this group.

Because our older members are now starting to leave or be less able to put in the hard yards, this leads to a major problem during the week when we have many offers of catering for local clearance sales.

Our pool of members who can work during the week is dwindling and it's getting to the stage where we may have to reduce some of our activities, we have already had to knock back some new projects.

At our Zoom meeting on Tuesday, July 28 we made some interesting changes to our structure with a new Youth Committee that will oversee all of our youth-related activities.

At this stage this includes our LEOs, the Youth of The Year Quest and our Peace Poster and Essay Competition.

Our second committee will oversee our response to barbecues and other fundraisers we have happening.

We run many programs in Forbes not the least of which are the regular car boot sale, The Drum Muster program helping to keep drums out of landfill, The Youth of The Year Quest, encouraging young people to participate in public speaking activities across Australia.

We have a LEOs club running at the Forbes High School and The Peace Poster and Essay Competition for Primary Schools.

We provided Lions Club Disaster Relief funding during the 2016 Forbes Floods. We have been providing Drought Relief right throughout our District and wherever else it is needed.

We have updated the Forbes Lions Park, provided Hearing Loops in primary schools in Forbes. We support Ronald MacDonald House with collection sites around Forbes.

Our direct annual support to local organisations exceeds $20,000 per year; our indirect support such as provision of manpower at events is immeasurable. You'll see us in our purple t-shirts helping out all over town.

How can you help? Well we appreciate all the assistance we get from people who attend our functions and buy our food at barbecues etc., but we need more members.

We need people to put their hands up and make a commitment to a couple of days per month.

Being a member of the Lions Club is an extremely rewarding experience, give it a try we are sure you'll find a project, such as the Youth of The year, The Peace poster Competition, Drum Muster, the Car Boot Sale or any of a number of other projects we have here in Forbes that you can put your effort into.

If you have a pet project idea that you'd like to bring to fruition, bring it to the club, we are always looking at new ways we can serve our community.

Finally, if any member of the Forbes Community feels that they would like to help us out with some of our activities, but doesn't wish to become a member of the club, we have our "Friends of Lions programme" where people can simply put their names on our register of Friends and we can call on them when an activity comes up in their area of interest.

If anyone would like to talk to us about membership of Forbes and District Lions, or register as a "Friend of Lions" please contact our Membership Chairperson Elaine Bright on 0402025888 or email ejb032003@gmail.com.