Welcome to Lions of Yavapai…

We are a coalition of Lions from Lions clubs across Yavapai County, Arizona. 

• This grouping arrangement provides Lions’ service beyond what individual Lions clubs can do.
• Participation in Lions of Yavapai is voluntary.  One only needs to be a Lion in good standing.
• Its activities purposely avoid interfering with work done by any Lions club in the county.

Lions of Yavapai Foundation, its official name, is an Arizona corporation and has an IRS 501(c)(3) certification as a Public Charity.  It is recognized by Lions Clubs International as an official Lions organization, a Foundation, instead of the more familiar club organization.  Its formation was formally approved by Lions Arizona District 21 North. 

The Lions of Yavapai organization has real potential to do good for persons in need in the region, and that is the reason for developing it as another Lions presence here.  Its mission is that of every Lions group – serving our community.

Part of the need for this Lions coalition is the expansive rural nature of Yavapai County.  Clubs’ limitations often mean service is only provided in the town in which they meet. But in the rural areas of our community Lions service is often absent.  Providing more Lions service is the impetus for and the focus of Lions of Yavapai.  To accomplish this, Lions of Yavapai can and do provide:  funding via conditioned access to the Lion Melvin Clack Fund and potential grants, organization of larger service projects, and sharing of volunteers and resources. This can better enable Lions to serve our Yavapai community.

Lions of Yavapai is a young endeavor still filling out its organizational structure and formal operation.  These startup details have been a second priority to its service mission.  The Lions creating this Foundation have already developed and implemented significant Yavapai County-wide Lions service.  They and coalition members will work to expand their service capability.

Lions who serve in Lions of Yavapai projects, in addition to the services of their home Lions club, have found that it provides rewarding in-person experiences.  And making Lions service more available in rural Arizona helps recognition of Lions International’s mission of service wherever there is a need.

Service – Mobile Eye Care Van

Lions of Yavapai is a way to bring Lions service to underserved parts of our Yavapai community, places where folks have been unaware of Lions service availability.  There are many people in need in rural, poor Yavapai.

Lions of Yavapai owns and operates a Mobile Eye Care Van with a fully equipped eye doctor’s examination room.  It travels to the rural burgs in Yavapai County, where poor people need eye care and cannot afford such “luxury”.  With volunteer doctors and volunteer Lions, Lions of Yavapai delivers Lions eye care service, enriching the lives of struggling folks.

Running 54 events from 2015 to 2023. This program completed its first chapter, assisting 1712 clients with exams and eyeglasses for those residents who resided in rural parts of Yavapai County.
Referrals for additional eye care were also made to those clients who needed that assistance. In December of 2023, the original Lions of Yavapai Mobile Eye Care van, at age 27, was pulled from service and retired. In 2024, Chapter Two began with a new Lionsteam and a 10-year-old medical van, retired from Dignity Health and donated by Dignity Health. This van was retrofitted with the instruments from the original van and became the Lions of Yavapai Mobile Vision Clinic.

The clients served by this program are people who would not get eye care otherwise. The glasses and any needed therapy are funded by the Lion Melvin Clack Fund, due to Lions of Yavapai studiously working out access to the fund. Lions of Yavapai made these folks’ lives a bit better by caring and getting them free Lions eye care.

This is:

• Very successful service to our greater Yavapai community;
• Very good publicity for Yavapai Lionism, and
• Very rewarding person-to-person service opportunity, and ongoing, for many Lions.

Service – Lions Screen Kids Sight

Lions of Yavapai was invited to apply for a $25,000 grant from the Arizona Community Foundation to vision screen young students in Yavapai County schools.

Three Lions from two clubs, working as Lions of Yavapai, developed the capability to photo screen kids in pre-K through grade four across the county, a task beyond a single club’s ability.

Visiting every club, the Lions of Yavapai startup team recruited 23 Lion volunteers from almost every Lions and Lioness club in Yavapai, trained them, and they traveled across club boundaries to where kids needed to be screened.  There was a new “across the mountain” cooperation.  The number of school kids and the locations of clubs do not match, so Lions travelled out of their immediate communities to fix this service challenge, with no club wrangling about jurisdiction.

Year one’s pilot program teamed with 11 schools and vision-screened 1,258 kids. All events were centrally planned and scheduled to give the new vision screeners some experience on how to set up and run these events.

In school year two, 2019-20, those events were all planned and scheduled by individual vision screening teams hosted by Lions clubs in Yavapai County. Those teams’ vision screened schools that were in their geographic areas, vision screening 27 of 33 possible schools in Yavapai County and 5,869 students. Four vision screening teams continued to operate independently in setting up their vision screening events, in school year 2020-21 school year.  2020-21 was a tough year, as service struggled due to COVID-19 virus constraints, but where we could, we did, still vision screening 1,739 students in 14 schools.

School year 2021-22 saw a considerable recovery, with vision screening of 3,360 students in 20 schools. The recovery continued in school year 2022-23, with vision screening of 4,269 students in 25 schools. The last two years have been impacted by the pending release of the AZ Department of Health Services (ADHS) Vision Screening Rules, that was a requirement of the 2019 vision screening legislation, mandating vision screening in Arizona. Schools opted to screen fewer grades in anticipation of the release of these rules. In school year 2023-24, we vision screened 3,721 students in 22 schools. In 2024, ADHS finally released the vision screening rules, further impacting the program. We vision-screened 2670 students in 23 schools for the school year 2024-25. After consultations with individual schools, we have better qualified the ADHS restrictions and hope to screen more students in the school year 2025-26.

This is:

• Very successful service to our greater Yavapai community;
• Very good publicity for Yavapai Lionism, and
• Very rewarding person-to-person service opportunity, and ongoing, for many Lions.
• And, this is beyond what individual clubs could do; club funding, organization, and manpower challenges would not be up to this level of service.

Going Forward

These services, performed and ongoing, demonstrate that Lions of Yavapai is an organization with actualized potential to do good for persons in need in the region, proving its rationale for being developed as another Lions presence here.

Lions of Yavapai, as a coalition of Lions from clubs all across Yavapai County, provides these services that are beyond what individual clubs can do.  These services are delivered by Lions and Lionesses, in addition to participating actively in their clubs, coming together as Lions of Yavapai.  Grouped in this way, they do service projects that use resources and operate in areas that are out of a Lions club’s scope.

Filling out Lions of Yavapai’s organizational structure and formal operation is a task at hand.  And coalition members will work on creating opportunities to expand their service capability.

If you are a Lion in good standing committed to serving persons in need in our community, please join like-minded folks in serving through Lions of Yavapai.