Colleyville Lions Club
Founder’s Biography
Melvin Jones asked business leaders to use their influence for something beyond themselves. Lions International grew out of that question.
The question
Melvin Jones was a Chicago businessman who belonged to the kind of business club that existed in every American city at the time: men with capital and influence, meeting to help each other.
He asked what would happen if they aimed that same organising ability at their communities instead.
June 7, 1917
The answer took shape at an organizational meeting in Chicago, Illinois, on June 7, 1917. Lions International dates from it. The first national convention followed that October, in Dallas, Texas.
The principle he built in
The idea only worked if it could not be quietly turned back into a business advantage. So the rule went into the foundation:
No club shall hold out the financial betterment of its members as its object.
More than a century later that sentence is still what separates a Lions club from a networking group.
What the question built
1.4 million members. More than 200 countries and geographic areas. Clubs in nearly every country on earth — including a club in Colleyville, Texas, chartered on June 1, 1982, that meets for breakfast on Friday mornings.
More of his story
This page carries only what the club can source. Everything else commonly repeated about the founder is left out rather than guessed at.
[VERIFY: a fuller sourced biography and an official portrait of Melvin Jones. Neither exists in any project asset pool. Both must come from lionsclubs.org — the brand resource centre and the Lions history fact sheet in the brand kit are the places to look first. Do not substitute a stock or generated portrait: fabricating the likeness of a real historical person is out of bounds.]
Where the idea went next.
From one Chicago meeting room in 1917 to more than 200 countries.