AUBURN — The annual Auburn-Lewiston Kiwanis Club Pancake Breakfast would have been 55 years old on Sunday. But that’s not going to happen.

The club has downsized from a full-fledged charter organization to a satellite of the Kiwanis Club of Norway-Paris. Sunday’s breakfast has been canceled.

It’s the reality of fewer volunteers and fewer members competing with a burgeoning number of community service opportunities in the Twin Cities, members say.

The Auburn-Lewiston club was chartered in 1922, and has been hosting its pancake breakfast on the second Sunday of June since 1957.

The money raised was used to help fund club activities, including the passes it provides to children to visit museums in Maine and its eyeglass program to benefit needy children.

Because the Auburn-Lewiston club is now a satellite to the Norway club, it can still offer its eyeglass program, Kiwanis member Patti Gagne of Lewiston said. “We are focused on the children of this community,” she said.

The A-L Kiwanis Club had dwindled to about six or eight active members, said Dan Goff of New Gloucester, chairman of the pancake breakfast for the past decade. The national organization requires charters to have 25 members, he said.

“Last year, we struggled to put the breakfast on and were barely able to do it with the volunteers we had,” Goff said.

In December, after losing a major sponsor and struggling with low membership to organize the event, the club decided to cancel it. In January, members voted to seek satellite status.

“Everything was stacked against us,” Goff said, “and there was a consensus that it was just impossible to put on.”

It’s sad, Goff said, “but all the service clubs, all of us have suffered tremendous drop in enrollment” because “there are so many ways for people to serve the needs of the public.”

Kiwanis and Rotary clubs are showing their age, he said. “Young people who want to get involved in community service have a number of other community organizations they can belong to.”

Gagne agreed, saying, “We probably didn’t change fast enough with the times,” but she’s optimistic the club can be revitalized and endure.

Gagne is a Lewiston insurance agent and sits on boards for the Androscoggin County Chamber of Commerce and Lewiston’s downtown Root Cellar. She is active in the community and hopes an informational meeting scheduled later this month will encourage new membership.

“I want to help,” she said, to regenerate Kiwanis membership in the Twin Cities.

Lewiston lawyer Andy Choate, a Kiwanian since 1983, trusts that renewed membership, new sponsors and active volunteers will enable the club to hold the pancake breakfast in 2013. A breakfast volunteer since he joined the club, Choate hopes “this can be turned around.”

“I think we got to a point in time, just like every other organization in this country right now,” Gagne said, with “modern-day technology and immediate gratification, that our focus has changed.”

That doesn’t mean people don’t want to do community service; it’s just that they have found other ways to contribute, she said.

When the Auburn-Lewiston club made its decision to downsize, members approached the Norway-Paris club for support, Goff said. Paris lawyer Sarah Glynn, former president of the Norway-Paris club, has been helping the Kiwanians in the Auburn-Lewiston club get better organized.

She said the energy in Lewiston and Auburn is “tremendously exciting,” and she’s anticipating good feedback from the group’s informational meeting.

Glynn said longtime Kiwanian and former Auburn Mayor Dick Gleason, who owns radio stations in Norway and Lewiston and is active in the Norway-Paris club, has been very supportive of the work to revitalize the Auburn-Lewiston club, and suggested Glynn coordinate a membership drive with help from the Androscoggin Chamber.

Glynn said the club also revitalized its contacts with its Key Clubs at Lewiston High School, Saint Dominic Academy in Auburn and Leavitt Area High School in Turner. It learned that St. Dom’s has plans to launch a Builders Club at the middle school level as part of the greater Kiwanis International mission.

Since the Auburn-Lewiston club was “looking like they were going to fade away into the sunset,” Glynn said, and reached out to the Norway-Paris club for help, there’s been “tremendous leadership support” to sustain the Auburn-Lewiston club, one of the oldest clubs in the New England District of Kiwanis.

“When the leadership of our district realized they needed help, they stepped right up. I’m optimistic they can turn this around,” Glynn said.

In the meantime, Goff said that club’s transportable kitchen equipment will remain available for other nonprofits that have used it in the past.

jmeyer@sunjournal.com

Informational night

An Auburn-Lewiston Kiwanis Club informational night will be held at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday, June 20, at the chamber, 415 Lisbon St.

For more information on the club, go to www.kiwanisauburnlewistonmaine.org.

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