Successful
Actions of Clifton Springs Grange - NY
“Clifton Springs Grange is located in Upstate New York about an hour from Rochester,” says Peter Croucher, Master. “We’re small in numbers but like to think we have a greater stature apart from that statistic. We’re a fairly young Grange with the average age of our active members being 48.”
“We do not now and never have owned a hall. And while there are times we’d like to have a permanent place to gather, we do like that we don’t have to pay insurance or fix the hot water heater.”
“Our niche is community service,” says Sandy Spears, Overseer. “We volunteer as Red Kettle Campaign Bell Ringers at Christmas time. We meet a lot of people while we’re ringing that bell and that helps us spread the word about Grange. We also go Christmas Caroling to our nursing home. For the last 3 years we’ve gone, there has been a resident who has a birthday around Christmas. She looks forward to us coming every year. It makes her birthday special – and it makes it special for us too.”
“Every Christmas we make a point to adopt a family. If there are children, we make sure there are presents under the tree, and give them a good holiday dinner too.”
“At the Demay Living Center, they have an angel tree. The angels all have residents’ names on the back with suggested gifts. We take two names every year. When we go to deliver the gifts, we talk to them about Grange, and it feels really good to hear them say, ‘Oh yes. I do remember Grange.’”
“We’ve been working with county election inspectors,” says Sandy. “They’ve been looking at three new voting machines. So we’re holding an instruction session with the machines they’re going to choose. And we do work to get people out to vote. That was the theme of our county fair exhibit this year, and we were very successful in getting folks to take voter registration cards.”
“We’re really excited about a new project that we’ve begun, and hoping that a lot of Granges in the state and all across the country will pick up on it. We’re putting together Military Care Packages and as part of that we’re compiling a photo album of every Grange in New York State. We’re going to actually put it together at our next State Grange Session, and then we’ll send it all to our troops just to say thank you. We’re excited to get this off the ground. State Grange has been a great help.”
“We really think it’s important to give to the Community. We get so much out of working for the community,” says Sandy. “Clifton Springs is like a quaint rustic village. Our old hospital has been converted to apartments and we have a truly wonderful Main Street and downtown area. We’re proud of our community and of our Grange.”
“For the last four years, Clifton Springs Grange has sponsored an Easter Egg Hunt,” says Sharon Croucher, Secretary. “Last spring the event grew to the point that we filled 3000 plastic eggs with candy. That takes us a couple of sessions around a dining room table. We ask businesses to donate prizes and various other supplies for the Easter Egg Hunt. For example, the bank gives us 50 cent pieces, the grocery store helps supply the candy, we get certificates for pizza. Clifton Springs Grange gives four savings bonds.”
“We divide the Hunt area up so that 4 age groups have their own area to hunt. We think that makes it easier for smaller children. And then we hide one bond each age group’s area. We’ve started to make up Easter baskets too, and one of those gets hidden for each age group. Last spring we had 120 children attend. We invite children from pre-K up to grade 5.”
“Another big project of ours is the Dictionary Project - Words for Thirds,” says Sharon. “Last year we gave out 144 dictionaries. One dictionary went to each 3 rd grader and we also gave one to each 3 rd grade teacher in our school district. A few of us visit each classroom to deliver the dictionaries. We talk about Grange and about dictionaries. We even do an activity with the children and get them to look up words in their new dictionaries.”
Sharon adds, “I really believe that the group from Grange that goes to the school gets as much out of going as the kids do. At church one morning, a little girl came up and tugged on my sleeve and said, ‘You’re the one who gave me the dictionary.’ How can you resist that?”
Bruce Croucher serves as Lecturer of Clifton Springs Grange. “I’ve been serving as Lecturer for a while, but with our recent elections I’ll soon be switching to secretary. For our programs, we’ve tried to feature unique aspects of our community,” says Bruce.
“The Clifton Springs Sanitarium was developed years ago to work both physically and spiritually to cure people. It took advantage of our natural sulfur springs, chiropractic, and many other alternative healing methods. Well those alternative medicine approaches have had quite a revival, and our hospital provides a variety of services. So we had someone from there come and talk about what those services are and how they might work.”
“Our oldest community service project,” says Bruce, “has been to plant flowers around the sign that welcomes people to our community. We get the flowers planted by Memorial Day each year. We began this project with the idea that if we really wanted to attract people to Grange, we needed to be doing things in the community.”
“Another thing we’ve done is to hold a Grange Information Night. We sent invitations to people we thought might be interested in knowing more about Grange, served refreshments and put together a Power Point presentation about who we are and what we do. We talked about community service projects we do, ideas of projects we’d like to do, legislative things we do at State Grange, the structure of Grange at the local, Pomona, State, and National levels, and that sort of thing. We had about half a dozen people who came. It was kind of a social evening.”
“We give an award which is given to a graduating senior at our high school’s commencement exercise. It’s a small monetary award that’s intended to help just a bit with college expenses. Originally it was intended for an FFA or FHA member, but we’ve opened the award to honor characteristics of citizenship and character. We ask that preference to a student in family and career sciences, but if there’s not a deserving student there, the award could be given to some other senior. We feel good about giving the award and it does get the name of Grange out in the public.”
“At our Grange Christmas party, we all bring canned goods which are then given to the community food cupboard, and I know it is much appreciated.”
“When you don’t your own Grange hall,” says Bruce, “There’s not a physical entity or a place for a sign with a Grange name that people recognize. It can be hard to maintain a presence and an identity among community members. We’re making progress on that front. It sometimes seems slow, but we’re making progress.”
“In terms of membership numbers, our Grange is small,” says Sharon. “We have 17 members all together. Two of our Grangers are Gold Sheaf members. Otherwise the members are pretty young. When our older members began passing away, we were in a stage of needing to rebuild.”
“Our dues are $25. Clifton Springs Grange gets to keep $5 and $20 goes for State and National Grange dues. Fundraising is another challenge when you’re small and when you don’t have a building,” says Sharon. “We hold Chicken barbeques to raise funds. Our treasury is really a kind of pass-through affair. We take in money and then pass it back to community. We’re not one of those small Granges that sits on a large treasury. We want our money out in the community where it will do some good. We have gotten small grants from Walmart to do some of our projects.”
“For years we rented the Odd Fellows Lodge for our meetings. Now our library provides a place for us to meet and to store our things. We give them $15 per meeting. Certainly there are pros and cons of owning or not owning a hall,” says Sharon. “As a renter we have sometimes had to make accommodations. We’ve been fortunate, but there are many times we’d like to have our own hall.”
Bruce agrees. “We might offer more community dinners if we had our own Grange Hall. We used to do dinners with a neighboring Grange who do have a building. We’d help serve the dinners and then share the earnings. But they’ve actually built their membership quite a bit in recent years, and they haven’t needed our help.”
“Another thing we really should mention is that our Grange actively participates in State Grange sports programs. In this year’s Golf Tournament, we had 3 teams – and we took 1 st, 2 nd, and 3 rd places. In bowling, our team took 3 rd place and we had an individual who took 1 st in women’s high scratch series. The chance to compete in these sports has been a means of getting some of our newest and youngest members.”
“We do set up the hall and have semi-regular openings,” says Sharon. “We do not take up the password.”
“And we don’t have an opening song,” adds Peter.
“No we don’t have a song and we don’t normally do flag presentation because we don’t really have enough members to do that,” says Bruce.
“We think of ourselves as an Action Grange in attitude,” says Sharon. “We are a Grange that is looking to ourselves and seeing what we need to do to be more viable in our community. We didn’t want the possibility of the password keeping people away so we chose to eliminate that. We read and adopt the minutes at close of that meeting. Then they are typed and passed out to members as they come in to the next meeting, and we don’t read them again. These are changes we made just to make meetings more efficient so that we could put more time into conversation about community service.”
“We haven’t felt a need to change the Grange Ritual. We have retained traditional titles within our Grange meeting, but we might refer to the Master as President out in the greater community where the title might not be understood.”
Sandy adds, “When we send out publicity to the newspapers we use both labels for our officers. We want people to understand us.”
“Our young membership comes mostly from family,” says Sharon. “Our children have been active members and some of their friends, spouses, and girlfriends have become members. Our younger members are young adults in 20-30 age group. We don’t have active teen members at this time. Every once in awhile we get someone who is interested in reactivating a Junior Grange, but that hasn’t come together for us yet.”
“At the County Grange, we try to let young people know we need them and give them a voice in matters that need to be discussed,” says Sandy. “Sometimes we’ll go to our young members and say we need them to do a project. And we sponsored some young people from the county to go to State Grange Camp. I believe we sent six this last year. That’s one more way to get youth involved.”
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