About

The Westfield Lions Club originated in 1924, and for over 85 years has served Westfield with pride, with charitable causes and service ranging from the eye/ear mobile and community clean-up campaigns, to its sponsoring of the annual Easter egg hunt at Mindowaskin Park held the Saturday before Easter.

The Westfield Lions are part of Lions International, which is the world's largest service organization, founded in 1917.
It is currently comprised of nearly 1.3 million men and women from 200 different countries and geographic areas. Collectively these Lions raise more than $500 million/year for charitable causes and contribute an estimated 60 million hours to community service.

Since 1925, when Helen Keller addressed its national convention, the Lions accepted the promotion of sight conservation and blindness prevention as its international charter and has since then become known as the "Knights for the Blind".

Nationally during the past year, nearly 4 million pairs of used or unwanted eye glasses were deposited by donors into distinctive yellow mail box shaped receptacles identified with the Lions emblem, one being at the corner of Broad and Elm Streets in Westfield. Once collected, they are processed at eye glass recycling centers in North America - the closest to us being New Eyes for the Needy, PO Box 332, Short Hills, NJ 07078, 376-4903 and the Lions Eyeglass Recycling Center in West Trenton -http://www.lionsclubs.org/EN/content/vision_eyeglass_jersey.shtml so as to give the priceless gift of enhanced sight to the poor in developing countries.

The Westfield Lions Club supports the Lions Eye Bank of NJ, in Springfield, NJ, which supplies a large percentage of New Jersey's corneal transplant needs. The Club also supports the work of the Lions Eye Research Foundation of New Jersey in their efforts to find a cure for common eye diseases.

Local Lions Clubs support several New Jersey summer and year-round camps and rehabilitation centers for visually handicapped children, athletes and adults, as well as the largest Master Tape Library of it's kind in the world (at Princeton) which makes available recorded books to those whose visual handicap makes them unable to read.

Additionally, for middle school students, the Westfield Lions Club sponsors a program of self-esteem and substance abuse prevention called (Lions Quest), supports the Roosevelt Intermediate School Leo Club which encourages students to volunteer part of their free time to the community and helps sustain the annual International Peace Poster Contest.

The Westfield Lions Club is an active service club whose motto, as with all Lions Clubs, is "We Serve".