This Pacific Northwest Based Elks Lodge is taking the Seattle Area by Storm...
Watch the Video and read the Article Below and come join the Fremont Elks Lodge in the Silicon Valley, we are just as fun, although unfortunately….. we don’t have a lake, but we are building Bocce Ball Courts!
BuzzFeed News - Ballard Elks Lodge #827
For over a century, fraternal orders like the Elks served as the cornerstone of American social and civic engagement. Here’s how one Seattle neighborhood has made the Elks, and the community it provides, cool again.
“We’re like a cult,” a tan, freckled, ambiguously aged woman tells me, the dregs of Coors Light swishing in the bottom of her plastic cup.
We’re in the women’s bathroom of the Ballard Elks Club, decorated with white wicker furniture and a tray of drugstore lotions and hairspray. “The guy I’m seeing, he’s a member too,” she continues, stuffing her phone into her Louis Vuitton purse. “And we’re trying to convince the club to do a fundraiser so we can go around and do to other clubs what we’ve done here.” Specifically: Make the Elks more appealing, more vital, maybe even cool — while still preserving its ties to both its old Seattle neighborhood and the longtime members who remain its core.
The woman is wearing an oversized faux fur vest and heeled suede boots, which is to say she’s dressed for neither the Elks nor Seattle. But the mother of two is a regular fixture at the lodge, which she joined about four years ago, so that “my kids would have somewhere to pee when we were at the beach.” That beach, right on the Puget Sound — and the bar that extends above it — is how the vast majority of the new members at the Ballard Elks found out about the lodge, which is one of the fastest-growing in America, mushrooming from around 800 members in 2012 to over 1,300 today. The lodge’s median age, 52, is the lowest in the country — and a figure that, if current trends hold, will only continue to fall.
Read the Full Article on BuzzFeed by clicking the link below….
