TCN FFA establishes Alumni, Friends, Family program

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LEWISBURG — Tri-County North Miami Valley Career Technology Center (MVCTC) FFA Chapter is working on establishing an FFA Alumni, Friends and Family program in which community members will offer their resources to provide learning opportunities for the chapter.

The chapter officers have played an integral part in organizing and seeking members for this new group. They are: President Delaney Shively, Vice President Samantha Nuse, Secretary Kylie Cooper, Treasurer Paul (Hunter) Pahl, Reporter Kellie Cooke, and Sentinel Chryseis Kazee.

Treasurer Pahl explained, “There are many different chapters even in our area who have an FFA Alumni and you can see, quite often, all the help the alumni does for them. [Alumni] help with their banquets and CDEs. We don’t have one [at Tri-County North] and you can tell at our competitions when we have to ask for a lot of help from our community.

“What the Alumni, Friends, and Family program will do is help us with our activities and funding – which is a big component. We weren’t able to send seven students to Nationals for cheap, because we didn’t have funds for it.”

According to the officer team, the FFA fruit sale did not make much money for the chapter this year. They have also had to skip sending students to Washington Leadership Conference (WLC) for the past several years, because of the shortage of funds. The last student to attend WLC from Tri-County North MVCTC FFA Chapter did so in 2017.

In addition to the funding aspect, the FFA Alumni, Friends, and Family program will also provide hands-on learning experiences and opportunities for chapter members.

“A lot of our Ag kids don’t have adult figures who are in the agriculture field, because we have a lot of ‘city kids’ in our Ag Department. If we had this program, students could go out to alumni member’s farms and see what it is like to be in the field, because they don’t have that at home,” Reporter Cooke said. “We need our alumni’s experience.”

The chapter is looking for anyone who supports FFA to join the Alumni, Friends and Family program — participants do not have to be an alumnus of Tri-County North or the TCN FFA Chapter.

There are three different tiers of membership:

•The first is the Associate Membership, which is free to people who have graduated high school in the past five years.

•The second is the Annual Membership, which is approximately $27, depending on state and local fees, for all who do not qualify for the Associate Membership.

•The last is the Lifetime Membership, which is approximately $160, depending on state and local fees.

“This will help us go on more trips and do more CDEs where we have alumni members in those fields. This will help our chapter expand,” Vice President Nuse said.

Currently, there are 20 TCN FFA Alumni, Friends and Family members. The group has more than enough members to make the group official, however, it needs commitments from those members and all interested, in hopes they will eventually lead the meeting themselves and become independent of the TCN FFA Chapter.

Meetings will be held once a month and 10 members must be present at each meeting in order to hold votes. The first meeting has not yet been scheduled.

If interested in joining or learning more about the FFA Alumni, Friends and Family program, contact Paul Pahl at 937-336-9257 or contact Advisor Charity Cox at [email protected].

By Kelsey Kimbler

[email protected]

Reach Kelsey Kimbler at 937-683-4061 or on Twitter @KKimbler_RH

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