Rotary Club of Plano West, Texas

Late one afternoon in early April, Alex Johnson parked his car on a modest street in Plano, Texas. Cell phone in hand, he began giving a FaceTime tour of the city’s historic Douglass neighborhood, a community established in the 1860s when two freed slaves settled there. The houses here were nothing like some grand estates he had passed earlier as he drove toward Douglass, but nestled on small, neatly trimmed lawns, many of the homes had a simple beauty. Some weren’t as nice; it was clear there was still room for improvement in Douglass, as well as in other Plano neighborhoods.

That’s where the Rotary Club of Plano West comes in. As Johnson, the club’s president, explains, Plano West always stands ready to help. The club partners with churches, schools, and the city on an average of more than six service projects a month, engaging in a hands-on way with virtually every part of Plano. But it was the work done in Douglass during the COVID-19 pandemic that helped transform Plano West into the thriving, diverse Rotary club that it is today.

The club’s success was applauded by John Hewko, Rotary International’s general secretary, in February when he told Plano West Rotarians that what their club had accomplished over the past year had left him “blown away.” From membership growth to increased diversity to a relentless commitment to service, the club is “a real example for other clubs to look at,” Hewko said.

Plano West is, in fact, the fastest growing Rotary club in the United States. The question is: How has it been able to pull that off — and can its success provide a blueprint for other clubs across the United States and beyond?

Plano West is, in fact, the fastest growing Rotary club in the United States.

Plano West was a different club when Johnson joined three years ago. The smallest of the city’s six Rotary clubs, Plano West had 20 members with a median age of 67. Only five were women, and when Johnson joined and boosted its membership to 21, he was the only person of color in the club. In other words, says Johnson, “we were the classic Rotary club.”

Johnson knew Rotary well. For about 15 years, he’d been a member of the Rotary Club of Plano, traditionally the city’s largest Rotary club, where he had served in leadership positions. But Johnson yearned to belong to a club that offered more service opportunities. After checking out the city’s other clubs, he decided to join Plano West. “It kind of flew under the radar,” he says.

Glen Thornton, a past president of Plano West, agrees. “We were a smaller club, certainly, than we are now.”

Some members of Plano’s other Rotary clubs were surprised when Johnson made the move. “Everybody was asking, ‘Why would you go from the largest Rotary club in Plano to the smallest?’” Johnson recalls. “My answer was, ‘They serve.’ When I visited Plano West, they were either talking about starting a service project or they had just completed one. I thought: This is powerful. This is Service Above Self. This is what Rotary is supposed to do.”

He thought, “I love this club. This is the club I want to lead.”

A commitment to service was one thing. But as Johnson well knew, a club with fewer than two dozen members — and mostly older ones at that — would have trouble achieving everything it might aspire to accomplish. For Plano West to embrace its potential, the club had to get younger and more diverse, and it had to grow.

Johnson reasoned that the best way to ensure future success would be to treat the club like a business. “If you look at a church as a business,” he asks, “what product are they selling? Religion. What product does a gym sell? Physical fitness.

“So, if you think of a Rotary club, what is our product? Community service. We have demonstrated resoundingly that the more service we do, the more members we get.”

That message resonated with James Thomas, the student services coordinator with the Plano Independent School District. When Johnson approached Thomas last year about possibly joining the club, Thomas replied, “Absolutely, as long as it’s boots-on-the-ground type stuff.” Once Johnson assured him that the club was all about service in the community, Thomas didn’t hesitate. “Sign me up,” he said.

Thomas’s job with the school district opened a new service opportunity for Plano West. The club partnered with the district on a program that distributed meals to students in need at the end of the school day. Teachers who were there to conduct after-school tutoring sessions first had to hand out the meals; Plano West volunteered to take over that task. “Alex said, ‘Let us do the manual labor,’” recalls Thomas, which allowed the teachers to reclaim valuable time to accomplish what they were there to do — teach.

For another project, in conjunction with the city of Plano and the Plano Police Department, the Plano West Rotarians handed out informational materials about COVID-19 in the city’s underserved communities. The partnership benefited both groups, says Ed Drain, Plano’s chief of police and a member of the Rotary Club of Plano Metro. “It was good for their club” in that it provided local Rotarians with another service opportunity. “But it was also good for the police department,” says Drain. That kind of engagement “helps us build better relationships in our community.”

In the southeast corner of Plano sits Douglass, a neighborhood of about 200 modest houses. In the years before the Civil War, two slaves, Mose Stimpson and Andy Drake, were brought to Plano under different circumstances: Stimpson to be the playmate of the master’s daughter, Drake as a laborer hauling logs from Louisiana to Texas. At some point, Drake was able to buy his freedom; Stimpson was granted his by the playmate when she became an adult. The two men were the founding fathers of the Douglass community, which is named in honor of the former slave, abolitionist, writer, and orator Frederick Douglass.

At the end of the 20th century, the neighborhood was struggling. The poverty level was high, and many homes were in serious disrepair and barely habitable. More recently, through a program called House on the Corner, Plano’s Christ United Methodist Church, where Thornton is a parishioner, did what it could to remedy that situation. Beginning in 2004, the annual program would build a house in the church parking lot and move it to an empty parcel of land it had purchased in Douglass, where it was sold at a discounted price to a moderate- or low-income family. That program attracted hundreds of volunteers, and at one point, Thornton served as project manager. But the church needed extra hands to accomplish some of its other projects, such as a weekly Sandwich Blessings program, which provided food and other necessities to the city’s homeless population. Once again, members from the Plano West club stepped up.

Then last summer, as the pandemic raged, the need to provide food to families grew more desperate. The Rotary Community Corps of Plano Douglass Community — a group of non-Rotarians who share a commitment to serving their neighborhood — launched a project to deliver meals to Douglass residents. (Johnson’s wife, Laura, serves as the chair of the Plano West club’s community corps committee.) With only a few volunteers, however, the deliveries could take eight hours or more. When the Plano West Rotarians heard about the situation, they offered to help. “We got involved,” Alex Johnson says, “and every other week we pulled together up to 30 volunteers. We were able to knock out the food deliveries in about 45 minutes. The more we did it, the more organized and structured it became.”

The effort “really put us on the map” in the Black community, Johnson says. “It helped establish our club’s reputation as a group that engaged the community. And because it was happening in a largely Black and Hispanic neighborhood, it really resonated with the residents. We were helping the most diverse, highest poverty area in Plano, and because of that the people were saying, ‘Oh, this old white man’s organization, wow, they’ve got a Black president, and they’re actually helping Black people and Hispanic people.”

The impact was swift. As the months passed, Johnson recalls, “eighty percent of the people who showed up to serve on our projects weren’t members of the club. But they would show up two or three times and all of a sudden they’re like, ‘Well, this is kind of cool.’ And before you know it, they were turning in applications and their friends were turning in applications to join the club.”

Today Plano West has more than 60 members, drawn from a diverse pool. “We’re like the United Nations,” Johnson says. “We have immigrant members from eight countries.” The club just inducted its second member from the LGBTQ community, and this year it plans to participate in the city’s gay pride festival. And at press time, the club had exactly as many female members as it did male. They had achieved one of their goals: gender parity.

Plano West hasn’t achieved only cultural, ethnic, and religious diversity. Its median age is now 50, after the last year also saw an influx of young people into the club, thanks to a 19-year-old who was already drawn to Rotary. Zain Kalson had joined an unauthorized Rotary club while attending high school in Frisco, Texas, just north of Plano.

“It’s kind of funny,” Kalson recalls. “A teacher started an unofficial Rotary club at Lebanon Trail High School without any approval and without really knowing anything about the big picture — just knowing that it was something meaningful. And after a couple of months, we realized that’s not the way it works.” That unofficial club eventually became a sanctioned Interact club, and when Kalson graduated, he decided to join a Rotary club.\

Drawn to the inclusiveness of the Plano West club and the number of service opportunities it provided, Kalson reached out to Johnson. Today, Kalson leads technology and social media tutorials to help Plano West better brand itself online, and he helped launch the club’s Young Adult Initiative to attract new members between the ages of 18 and 22. Until 1 July, he also served as president of the Rotaract Club of the University of Texas at Dallas, and he is currently Plano West’s secretary.

Johnson realizes that not all Rotarians are comfortable with the Plano West approach. At a meeting in March — after inducting Bruce Mang, a pre-med student at the University of Texas at Austin, as a new member and recognizing Laura Johnson as a Paul Harris Fellow — the club welcomed its guest speaker: Morris Garcia, the president of the North Texas Pride Foundation.

We have a service project assembly line. We partner with everybody. We ask for nothing. We just help.

All of which helps answer the question that Rotarians regularly pose to Johnson: How have you been able to continue to increase the number of members in your club?

The secret is simple, Johnson says: Engage with the community through service. “At Plano West, we have a service project assembly line. We partner with everybody. We ask for nothing. We just help.”