Dear Dedicated Members for Change,
Recently I had occasion to visit the county Courthouse in a small Northern California town. While waiting in the clerk's office, I was chatting with two of the clerks - local women who had each worked for the court for over 25 years. As I am wont to do, the conversation turned to the Odd Fellows. I mentioned that I have been a member of the Independent Order of Odd Fellows for over 20 years. They both asked me, "What's the Odd Fellows?"
The question intrigued me because there is a multi-story Odd Fellows Lodge Hall on the same side of the street as the Courthouse, less than 100 yards from the front of that Courthouse. I mentioned that to the ladies and they were both taken aback. Even though an Odd Fellows Lodge was just paces from the place where they had worked for over a quarter century in a town where they both lived, they were unaware of the existence of the Lodge or of Odd Fellows.
As Odd Fellows, what important truth can we learn from this casual conversation?
It tells us that the this Lodge may be invisible in the community. (And I'm sure that this is not an isolated phenomenon. I'm confident that the cloak of invisibility has hidden many Lodges in our jurisdiction and around North America.) Part of it is the lack of adequate signage declaring the building to be a Lodge of Odd Fellows. For some reason, many of our Lodges have precious little signage, and the meager signage (usually just the three links, or the letters I.O.O.F.) are typically located at the very tippy top of the structure, where most people don't even see it. But apart from identifying signage, the major root of the problem is that the Lodge members stay isolated in the four corners of their building, and rarely, if ever, reach out into the community at large.
Let's talk about signage. I suspect that a significant factor relating to deficient signage is that - in many communities - the structure and amenities of the Lodge Hall have been virtually ignored for years, if not decades. That's a real shame and a slap in the faces of the Odd Fellows who, many years earlier, had worked hard to pull together the funds to build and equip a Lodge Hall. When was the last time that paint was applied to the Hall, inside and out? When was the last time that carpets and flooring were upgraded? When was the last time that signs were affixed announcing to the world that this was a Lodge of Odd Fellows? Simply put, we cannot rest on the work of the past generations. We have to do our part to address the look and feel of our Lodge Halls. And we have to ensure that the signs we display to the world proudly and clearly announce our presence in the community. After all, it is the community that surrounds our Lodge Hall from which we will ultimately draw our future members.
And let's talk about our relationship to our community. Unless we want the future membership of our Lodge to be composed almost entirely of the cousins and in-laws of our current members (as we see some of our Lodges have become), then we must emerge from the four walls of our Lodges and reach out into the community at large. Sitting in a room in a building, once a month, doing little more than reciting words from our ritual books will not attract the new generation of future members. And doing little more than conferring degrees and hosting an occasional potluck will not keep those new members interested in continuing their membership. Ultimately, the Lodge must sponsor fun events for members, and charitable events for the community. When Odd Fellowship first started as a fraternity, the members had fun. Do the current members of your Lodge have fun?
F - L - T
Dave Rosenberg
Past Grand Master
Jurisdiction of California
