Around 1650 French author François de la Rochefoucauld wrote: "The only thing constant in life is change". It is as true today as it was almost 400 years ago. Life is an ongoing process and what worked ten years ago will not necessarily work as well today, and in ten years from now might not work at all.

In Challenges in Volunteer Management Matthew Liao-Troth explains the current situation which existed in American society as we entered the 21st century as it relates to volunteer organizations such as fraternal benefit societies. Some of the assumptions used will be familiar to everyone who has been in Freemasonry for any length of time, some may come as a surprise.

• Only one out of four Americans work for companies which encourage active participation in volunteering which means 75% of the work force has no training on how to work within a 100% volunteer organization such as Freemasonry.
• There is a perceived estrangement between young people and adults which is seen as growing. A 1999 study done by Schneider and Stevenson  reported that American teenagers on average spend 20% of their waking hours alone which is more time than they spend with their families and friends, furthermore, this time alone increases as the teenager progresses in high school.
• Since 1960 all American fraternal benefit societies have seen a loss of membership and are now perceived as “old men’s clubs”. These circumstances brought the leadership of the National Fraternal Congress of America, which include Knights of Columbus to create a “Join Hands Day” event to initiate a national day of service in 2000.  The event would have the following as its stated goals.
• Make a contribution to solving the problem of America becoming an age-segregated society. Address problem conditions in local neighborhoods.
• Increase the visibility and public awareness of fraternal benefit societies.
• Reenergize local lodges by increasing membership and participation, particularly among young people. After three years the effects of this event on one fraternal benefit society, the Aid Association for Lutherans (AAL) was tabulated. The results show that after one year the numbers of new members peaked in 2001. However, the events of 9/11/2001 probably had a direct bearing on that, but were not considered in the report. What is important to notice is that the level of participation in the event, calculated by the number of hours of time and effort donated by all age groups, increased over the entire three years of the study.
  

Actually the study is part of a course I have written on how to retain members and covers a much wider field than a few hundred words can relay.

One of the major problems we have is after 60 years, despite the number of years in which a Mason is active in their lodge plummeting from over 20 years to fewer than 4; we still do not have one standardized course on how to retain members in our lodges.

That is incredible!

The much ballyhooed mentoring courses so many Grand Lodges love to endorse actually fail at the most critical point in a young Master Mason’s career. When anyone first joins Freemasonry, for whatever reason, they are thrilled with the idea of becoming part of something that is bigger than them.

Professionals in volunteer management refer to this period as the honeymoon effect. For the first few months every candidate is kept busy. They learn their obligations and go through the degrees. Then the activity is over. They are a new raised Master Mason.

Every Grand Lodge mentoring program I have run across, stops contacting these men within 60 days after they have been raised. That is unfortunate, because that is precisely when they begin to question the reasons why they joined in the first place. They have doubts and questions but there is no one to answer them. Many of these men have spent much of their time in their formative years alone with their computer and communicating via text messaging. They are reluctant to ask anyone in the lodge a question so they keep quiet. After a while they just stop coming to lodge. The really sad part is that few people in the lodge even notice they are gone until they show up on a list as not having paid their dues.

For a fraternity which espouses brotherly love, meeting on the level, acting by the plumb and parting on the square, our lodges are very hierarchal in structure, dictatorial in management, and unconcerned with the daily lives of our members who are not part of our little cliché.

The solutions are available. We can change things around very fast, if we wanted to. We have plenty of real world examples of entities which have done just that, but still we sit here and discuss what we should do. Many promise to work to change things, but so far very few have done anything. After all, we all have our own agendas to think about, don’t we?

Fraternally,

Jack Buta