The New Paris Kiwanis Club, which has met in the Village of New Paris, Ohio for over sixty years, welcomes you to our website. We hope that you find the information within helpful and invite you to join our club and help us to continue our good works for the village of New Paris & its children.

Our club may be small, but we have accomplished many things since our inception over sixty years ago. We have continued to sponsor/charter our Boy Scout Troop each year since we started the club and have a strong commitment to helping the troop achieve its goals. We have a picnic for the scouts each July at the farm of one of our members. This is a great way to relax and find out what the year has brought to the scouts in terms of awards, merit badges & campouts.

Our main fundraiser, an automotive/motorcycle Swap Meet, occurs each February & is located at the Preble County, Ohio fairgrounds. Folks from far & wide attend, loaded with all sorts of automotive/motorcycle related parts, tools, accessories, you name it and we most likely have it there. If we don't, then one of our vendors can surely find it for you.

Our next biggest fundraiser is our Labor Day Auction held at the field of the New Paris American Legion Post 360. This has been a tradition dating back some fifty years now. We get many donations from the New Paris Community and well beyond. Both large & small items all help us immensely. We also have many people that bring their items to auction on consignment and we receive 20% of those proceeds. Our auctioneers donate their time and the local Delta Theta Tau Sorority sets up a booth to sell sandwiches, baked goods, coffee, etc. It is a fun way to end the summer season and all our earnings go back into the community.

In March we meet at the local Catholic Church in New Paris & have our traditional Pancake & Sausage supper. This is more of a "feel Good" thing to do for the community, rather than a money maker. We hope to break even each year and we have done a bit better than that, so no complaints at all. The banter between members is always funny with competitions between the sausage grillers on who cooks up the better sausage outside. While the inside is poetry in motion watching the pancake masters make, flip & serve twenty or more at a time. We always have out a jar for donations to our scholarship funds and this always seems to be quite full by the end of the supper. Testament to the generosity of our community.

A new tradition we started in the summer of 2011 is a kids/family outside movie night at Our meeting place, St. Paul's United Methodist Church. We set up a large screen on the wall of the church and have a kid friendly movie. One of our members brings a digital projector, DVD player & speakers. One donates the DVD movie, while another donates the soft drinks, candy & popcorn. Our first time was very successful with thirty kids & parents showing up with blankets and fold up chairs. It was a lot of fun and we hope to repeat it two or possibly three times next summer. We also hope to include free hotdogs along with the other movie fare.

When folks are in need we step up to help. The sad loss of a deputy Sherriff from an illness prompted us to set up a spaghetti dinner and to raise money for his family. The outpouring from the community and even outside the community was amazing. We invited his widow to one of our meetings and presented her with a check.

When a local teacher, paralyzed from a car accident years earlier, developed a rare infection we also stepped up to the plate. His ordeal lasted almost eleven months and he was told that a stand up wheelchair was the best way to improve his quality of life. We became the sponsoring charitable organization and immediately donated $500. Then raised another $600 from a spaghetti dinner and another $179 from a raffle at the swap meet. All total the family & his friends raised over $29,000 in less than five months. We were blessed to be able to help him where ever we could.

Our club also donates to the New Paris food bank which is located at our meeting place, St. Paul's Methodist Church. We also have several scholarships and give out about $1,200 total in three of them to students from our local High School, National Trails. Come Halloween you will always find us at the Eaton National Bank parking lot in New Paris, passing out handfuls of candy to all the trick or treaters. Some other programs we lend a hand in are Special Olympics, various programs in our local school system, school supplies/backpacks for school kids, eye exams/eyeglasses for needy kids, programs that help the developmentally challenged, donations to the local Preble County Historical Society among others. 

Finally we are also very active with interclub events & activities. By visiting other Kiwanis clubs or having them visit us, it is a great way to help other clubs to promote each others causes to a broader range of people. Our club is also fairly social and we enjoy each other's company with fifth Thursday get-togethers, pizzas, Bar-B-Ques & other social activities over the course of the year.

This is but a brief overview of the things we accomplish each year. We are a but a small Kiwanis club, but have a big heart, and are there for our community and its children.

Another successful Labor Day Auction! We made around $2,200 that will all go to helping the community we serve & its children! Thanks to everyone that helped make this auction another success!