Mark Rossi
State First Vice President
I hope your 2026 has started off healthy and is heading in a positive direction. How are your New Year resolutions going? The experts say that most of our resolutions don’t make it past the 9th of January. I hope that is not the case for you!
How did your Lodge do with Membership in 2025? Do you have any plans for membership recruitment in 2026? We all talk about wanting to grow membership, but few of us are actually able to do it. It’s not easy or we all would be doing it. In 2025 we sadly lost the Rose-ville Lodge and the Vincenzo Bellini Lodge in Chico. A few of their members transferred to the Sacramento Lodge and the Shasta Lodge in Redding. Lodge closings are painful, they are painful for the members that lose their friends and the community of the Lodge, painful for the community that loses a fraternal service organization and painful for all of us who lose longtime friends and members. Preliminarily overall membership for 2025 decreased by 148 members and our Lodge count dropped to 34.
Not all of the membership news was grim; we did have five Lodges with double digit growth and another ten Lodges with single digit growth. With our aging membership it can be a challenge just to keep your membership number the same from year to year.
At the January Presidents’ Zoom Meeting, the Napa Lodge shared some of the key ingredients that have helped them grow their membership over the last two years. The Presidents’ Zoom Meeting is on the 4th Thursday of each month and it starts at 6:00 p.m. This is a great forum for Lodge Presidents to share best practices and discuss challenges that they are running into.
The Grand Lodge continues to work with National and our local Lodges on implementing the iMembersDB program. At some point in the future National is planning to use the program to calculate National per capita. As that gets closer, it will become increasingly important to keep the Lodge membership data in iMembersDB up to date. Currently, if a Lodge is not using the iMembersDB program, our Office Manager, Alison is keeping their membership data up to date. It would be very helpful if each Lodge could take on the responsibility of keeping their membership data up to date.
The 2026 March Grand Council will be held in Torrance, CA. The Grand Council meeting will be on Saturday March 21, 2026 at the Centinela Valley Lodge Hall. The meeting will open at 9:00 a.m. and is open to any member who would like to attend. Also, the Scholarship Committee will be meeting on Sunday March 22 at the Centinela Valley to review scholarship applications and make scholarship selections.
I was very sorry to hear of the passing of Past State Vice President Joseph Simoni. Joe had been a very active member of the Colombia Lodge serving in many capacities including Lodge President. Joe chaired and served on the State Leadership and Membership Committees as well as some National Committees. I think Joe will be best remembered as a musician. Joe loved to play the accordion. One of my first memories of Joe was watching him and John Linda playing their accordions together. Rest in Peace Joe.
There is still time to reach out to the high schools in your area and let them know about the Grand Lodge Scholarship program. Scholarship applications can be found on the Grand Lodge website at: https://osiaca.org/scholarships/. The submission deadline is March 1, 2026.