Are you an Optimist?

Are you an Optimist? We invite you to share your Optimist pride with other Optimist Club members in the Pacific Northwest with this unique, specially designed PNW Optimist Clubs t-shirt.

Optimist Clubs in the Pacific Northwest touch thousands of lives each day. By sharing their positive words and actions, Optimist Club members make a difference. They especially impact children with varied programs that meet the needs in their local communities.

In the PNW, there are Optimist Clubs that, among other things, manage a transitional home for young people; deliver various sports programs including golf, football, soccer, and curling, among others; host communication contests for essay writing and public speaking; sponsor family movie nights and library programs; coordinate programs to tackle food insecurity; host talent shows, school supply drives, walking programs, seasonal activities for Christmas and Easter; and so much more.

Optimist Clubs support the purposes of Optimist International, the first of which is to promote optimism as a way of life. They do that by coming together in friendship and fellowship where they reinforce their mission to live by the words of the Optimist Creed.

With the Optimist Creed, we promise ourselves:

To be so strong that nothing can disturb your peace of mind.
To talk health, happiness and prosperity to every person you meet.
To make all your friends feel that there is something in them.
To look at the sunny side of everything and make your optimism come true.
To think only of the best, to work only for the best and to expect only the best.
To be just as enthusiastic about the success of others as you are about your own.
To forget the mistakes of the past and press on to the greater achievements of the future.
To wear a cheerful countenance at all times and give every living creature you meet a smile.
To give so much time to the improvement of yourself that you have no time to criticize others.
To be too large for worry, too noble for anger, too strong for fear and too happy to permit the presence of trouble.

Today, we ask you to act on one more promise to yourself. Show your pride, your optimist pride with a PNW Optimist Clubs t-shirt. Buy it and wear it proudly. It makes the optimist difference and when we make the optimist difference, together, with others, we make the world a better place to live for all.

Check out the colors and styles of the PNW Optimist Clubs t-shirt at this link. Thank you.

Larry Blackburn: Proud to be an Optimist

Larry Blackburn is the Governor of the Pacific Northwest District – Optimist International and a member of the Caldwell and Middleton Area Optimist Clubs. This year, he is supporting the Middleton Area Optimist Club’s Free Movies in the Park program with an on-screen advertisement, but it was important to Larry that the ad talk about Optimist Clubs rather than his business.  He wanted people to know that he is proud to be an Optimist because, “You get more out of life when you put more into it.”

Being an Optimist Club member allows you to stay connected to your community, but as Larry discovered, you have to work at it. He explained that he had been a member of the Caldwell Optimist Club for 30 years, but many of those years he was inactive because he was working in Boise – 20 minutes away.  As he became semi-retired, the opportunity to reacquaint himself with his Optimist Club appeared and he became its club president, for the second time. This time, he decided to learn more. He went to district meetings, helped start a new Optimist Club, and was named Optimist of the Year by the PNW District for his unwavering enthusiasm. He also attended his first Optimist International Convention and was bitten by the leadership bug.  Larry, an energetic cheerleader, would be the first to say that leadership is not about being in charge. It is about helping others do more.

Optimist Club members do amazing things in their communities. Sometimes the projects are recognized in the press, but most often they are not. This extra push on “Why I’m Proud to Be an Optimist” will be shared on Facebook and other social media channels including the PNW District blog. We hope that you will join us in sharing your picture, and your one or two-line reason for belonging to the most inspirational service club in the world. 

And today, for our first "Proud to be an Optimist Day," we ask that you change your profile picture on Facebook for one day. Show your pride. Thank you.  

Click here to download the "Proud to be an Optimist" badge.