2020 Pandemic (so far!)
When I started the year as President (2019-2020 year), I was so excited and couldn’t wait to hit the ground running on all the Paragon Optimist Club’s community service and fellowship activities. First quarter came and went in a flash, and we had so much fun and so many members attending meetings. Then we fell into second quarter and a global scare.
What do you do as a very active Optimist Club during a pandemic? You put your heads together and come up with a plan!
Plan A – a huge failure! We got on Facebook messenger but found out you can only have 8 members on at a time, so onto another plan. After all isn’t there some saying about you succeed by failing fast….
Plan B – a success! Since some of our members switched to working from home during this time, it was suggested we try Zoom. One of our members took the initiative to set it up, emailed the link to all members, and lo and behold we were able to resume meetings with fantastic member turnout!
These were not your typical meeting per se but a meeting nonetheless. We once again could take care of Optimist business however our entire event’s calendar became obsolete. We once again put our heads together to stay social. Some of the fun things we did after our meetings were: trivia, show & tell, funny story night and a pajama party.
Our Sergeant at Arms, Sally, made each Tuesday night just a little more interesting with over the top instructions for the next week’s meeting, such as wearing funky jewelry, funny hat, pajamas and purple clothing, to name a few.
We may miss being able to see each other in person, but we have been able to stay in touch and continue the great work we do as Optimists. The remote meetings have also given our Club a chance to see things in a different light. Each week we now open our homes to each other, which at times includes random pop-ins from their family and friends! We also learned the difficulties of speaking in unison when we try to recite the Optimist Creed at the end of our meetings. The video below is an example of our most recent attempt, which I must proudly admit we have really improved over these past few months…
When Ohio begins to reopen, we are looking forward to the day we can actually meet in person and once again become the Club I know we are.
What a year to be President!
Sharon B