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Leos of Sri Lanka & Maldives: Inspiring Lives

History

The Lions story

Melvin Jones asked a Chicago lunch club what it would do if it looked past its own members. The answer became the largest service organization in the world, and every Leo club charters through it.

Founded
Chicago, 7 June 1917
First convention
Dallas, October 1917
Today
1.4 million members
State Street, Chicago, photographed in 1917 or 1918: streetcars, delivery wagons and a column of sailors outside the department stores.

Leo Multiple District 306, Lions International

Inspiring Lives

Street level on the same negative: State Street, Chicago, 1917–18. This is the city Melvin Jones was writing from, not a picture of the Business Circle.
Street level on the same negative: State Street, Chicago, 1917–18. This is the city Melvin Jones was writing from, not a picture of the Business Circle.U.S. National Archives · public domain

Chicago, 1917

A question put to a lunch club

Melvin Jones was thirty-eight, owned an insurance agency in Chicago, and was the secretary of a lunch club called the Business Circle. Clubs of that kind were ordinary and their purpose was plain: members met so that business could be put each other's way.

Jones asked his club a different question: what would happen if men who had already made themselves successful turned the same talent and drive on the city they had made it in. “You can’t get very far until you start doing something for somebody else” is how he later put it. The Business Circle agreed, and Jones wrote to every independent club of its kind he could find in the United States.

Dallas, October 1917

What the association agreed not to do

Delegates from twenty-four clubs met at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas on 8 October 1917 and founded the Association of Lions Clubs. Dr William Perry Woods was elected its first president. Jones took the secretary’s chair and, in one form or another, held it for the rest of his working life.

The convention spent as much of itself on the limits as on the purpose, and those limits are the reason the organization travelled. Party politics and sectarian religion stay outside the club. No member trades on the membership for private gain. Service is given without expectation of return. They are still written into the Objects and the Code of Ethics, and a Leo club chartering in Sri Lanka or the Maldives today charters under the same three.

Helen Keller around 1920, five years before she came to Cedar Point. Photographed for the Los Angeles Times.
Helen Keller around 1920, five years before she came to Cedar Point. Photographed for the Los Angeles Times.Los Angeles Times archive, UCLA Library · public domain

Cedar Point, Ohio, 30 June 1925

Knights of the blind

Helen Keller came to the association’s ninth convention and did not thank the Lions for anything. She asked them for something, by name, in front of the room.

I appeal to you, Lions — you who have your sight, your hearing, you who are strong and brave and kind — will you not constitute yourselves Knights of the Blind in my crusade against darkness?
Helen Keller, addressing the Lions convention, 1925

They said yes, and it is the oldest commitment the organization carries. Sight is why Lions and Leo clubs run screening camps and spectacle drives, why cornea donation is a standing project across Sri Lanka, and why the largest programme LCI has ever funded is an eye programme.

Since 1954

Two words, and what they now carry

The association ran a competition among its own members for a motto and took the entry submitted by a Lion from Fonthill, Ontario. It is two words long, We Serve, and it has not been changed since.

Lions Clubs International now has about 1.4 million members in more than 46,000 clubs, and it works in more countries than almost any other voluntary body. None of that is the part that reaches a young person in Kandy or Kulhudhuffushi. This is: every Leo club in the world is chartered by a Lions club, funded and backed by one, and free to plan its own service. The question Melvin Jones asked his lunch club is the one a Leo club answers every time it decides what to do next.

The record

The dates, in order

What the chapters above describe, set out as the archive holds it.

  1. 1917

    One question, one association

    Melvin Jones, secretary of a Chicago lunch club, put it to independent clubs across the United States that they could do more together than apart. Twenty-four of them sent delegates to the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas that October, and the Association of Lions Clubs was founded there.

  2. 1920

    International

    The first club outside the United States was chartered in Windsor, Ontario, in March. The association became international three years after it was founded, and has been organizing across borders ever since.

    Windsor, Ontario, from the air in 1920: the river, the rail yards and the downtown blocks, in the year the town chartered the first Lions club outside the United States.
    Windsor, Ontario, from the air in 1920: the river, the rail yards and the downtown blocks, in the year the town chartered the first Lions club outside the United States.Canadian Postcard Company, British Library · public domain

  3. 1925

    Knights of the blind

    Helen Keller addressed the convention at Cedar Point, Ohio, on 30 June and asked the Lions to constitute themselves knights of the blind in her crusade against darkness. Sight has been a Lions cause from that afternoon to this one.

  4. 1945

    At the founding of the United Nations

    Lions were among the non-governmental organizations invited to San Francisco to help draft the United Nations Charter, and LCI has held consultative status with the UN since.

    Members of the Indian delegation at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, July 1945: the conference Lions were invited to.
    Members of the Indian delegation at the United Nations Conference on International Organization, San Francisco, July 1945: the conference Lions were invited to.UN Photo / Yould · public domain

  5. 1954

    We Serve

    A competition among the membership produced the motto, submitted by a Lion from Fonthill, Ontario. Two words, unchanged since, and the shortest statement of the organization there is.

  6. 1957

    The Leos begin

    A Lions club in Pennsylvania sponsored a service club for the students of a local high school. The Leo Club Program grew out of it and became an official programme of Lions Clubs International ten years later.

    Abington Senior High School, Pennsylvania, photographed in 2021. The building has changed; the first Leo club in the world was formed by students here in 1957.
    Abington Senior High School, Pennsylvania, photographed in 2021. The building has changed; the first Leo club in the world was formed by students here in 1957.Victor Scimitar, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

  7. 1968

    A foundation behind the clubs

    Lions Clubs International Foundation was established to fund work no single club could carry: disaster relief, sight programmes, and large-scale humanitarian grants.

  8. 1990

    SightFirst

    Lions launched SightFirst to fight preventable and reversible blindness worldwide, building eye care systems in the places with the least of them. It remains the largest programme the foundation has ever run.

    An eye examination at the Kitale eye clinic in Kenya, 2021. Not a Lions or a Leo project: it is a photograph of the work SightFirst exists to pay for.
    An eye examination at the Kitale eye clinic in Kenya, 2021. Not a Lions or a Leo project: it is a photograph of the work SightFirst exists to pay for.Mwangiw, Wikimedia Commons · CC BY-SA 4.0

  9. 2017

    A hundred years

    The association marked its centenary a century after the Dallas convention, with a service challenge its clubs and Leo clubs ran together.

Where this leads

The Leo Club Program is the youth half of that history: the same work, planned and led by young people. Leo Multiple District 306 is where it happens in Sri Lanka and the Maldives.

Read the Leo historyAll three histories