05/04/2026
The Progress Club of Greater Moncton is celebrating its 25th year!
Glenn Steeves (l) and Gordon Robinson (r), pictured below, are charter members of the Progress Club of Greater Moncton.
The Progress Club of Greater Moncton started with “a tap on the shoulder” 25 years ago in…Halifax.
“My brother was part of the Progress Club in Halifax and had been for a number of years,” says Gord Robinson. “They had sports banquets and he used to invite me down and I’d go with some business guys or my dad.”
As Robinson was talking with Tommy Lasorda, the famous baseball coach of the Los Angeles Dodgers, “trying to figure his brain out a little bit,” he got the tap.
It was one of the Progress members asking him to meet in another room. “So, I went in the next room, there's about 8 people there, my brother and I being one of them, and they said, ‘We want to open up a branch in Moncton. We want you to be the guy.’
“Which I never thought of it, right? At that point, I’m just like, ‘Wow, hang on’. They said ‘You get a dozen, 15, 16 guys together, 20 guys, and we'll come up and do a dog and pony show. We'll take care of everything; Get the hotel, we'll pay for all that.’ So that's what I did.”
Robinson is recalling the birth of the club with Glenn Steeves over coffee and carrot cake at a coffee shop in Moncton’s west end. They are the last two “charter members” of the club.
“Gord was 100% why this club started. He did it all,” says Steeves.
“Almost everybody that joined was somebody he knew. Sometimes he’d put someone in a headlock and say ‘Come on, we’re going to do this,” he says with a laugh.
So, on June 9, 2001, the Progress Club of Greater Moncton was born with about 15 members with a focus on helping children.
“That was a feeling of the group at the time. It wasn't to raise money for seniors, it wasn't to raise money to build a room at the hospital. It was to raise money to help children and help children in need,” says Steeves.
The first fundraiser was a golf tournament and pig roast at the Pine Needles golf club in Shediac set for that September. A few days before the event, Steeves was on the phone with the woman who would do the roast. “And so I'm talking to her, and she said, you know, ‘Glenn, my TV is on here right now. And there's something going on in New York. Like, oh, it looks like there's some kind of war or something.’ ”
It was September 11. Planes were grounded all over North America. “Half the teams did not make it. But nevertheless we ended up with a pretty good tournament. We made some money,” says Steeves.
“Five hundred bucks,” adds Robinson.
The one constant fundraiser throughout the last quarter century is the annual Christmas Antler Breakfast — every year for more than 20 years. That first year, it was held at Highfield Square, Moncton’s first shopping mall, since torn down to make way for the Avenir Center. “ We raised $810. I don’t know why I remember that now but we were ecstatic!” says Robinson. “We thought we had plenty to give away. We were all high-fiving!” Now the breakfast is held at the Delta Beauséjour Hotel, and it regularly raises over $80,000 that the club invests in local children and youth serving charities.
