Get to know Marion Metro

Marion Metro Kiwanis was chartered in April, 1999. Since then we have grown into one of Marion’s best service clubs by serving the needs of children here and abroad.

We are best known for our annual BBQ Rendezvous that we started in 2011. The first Saturday of June our club hosts 3 bands and award winning BBQ vendors from around the state and Midwest for a family friendly event.

But we’re more than just good food and music in the sun.

Each year we get the elementary schools in Marion to collect books to donate. We gather them up and donate them to Toys for Tots and other agencies around the metro area. In the first 20 years we have collected over 200,000 books valued over $1,000,000. The classroom at each of the participating school with largest total of books gets awarded a pizza party from Happy Joes as our way of saying thanks and GREAT JOB.

Another long standing project is our annual Easter Egg Hunt. Every year we partner with the Parks Department to scatter eggs to give the local kids a fun time scrambling for eggs. We always schedule this for the Saturday the week (8 days) before Easter. Many years the weather is a challenge but on the years we get lucky we host the “fastest 2 minutes in sports” as the kids vacuum up the thousands of eggs we scatter around Lowe Park near Oak Ridge Elementary.

Pediatric Trauma Kits for volunteer first responder squads around Iowa is another big project for us. We established a matching grant program that allows us to place these kits in the hundreds of squads around the state. These kits have been used to save kids lives!

We can always use more hands for service, new ideas, and new perspectives on the needs of our kids. Just because we are the best community service club in eastern Iowa doesn’t mean we can’t get better. Are you the one that can make us better than the best? Tell us here.