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Feature Stories
You've Been Served | To Serve is to Learn
Rural Youth Impact Communities Through Living to Serve Grants
FFA Chapters Turn Community Service into a Habit of the Heart
FFA Chapters Turn Community Service into a Habit of the Heart
FFA doesn’t just develop agriculture professionals. FFA develops leaders – young people willing to work hard, lead others and give back to their communities. Many of those fine qualities are best brought out through contributing to and leading community development.
“FFA’s motto is ‘Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, and Living to Serve,” notes Kevin Keith, FFA Local Program Success Specialist for the Northeastern United States. “It shows the deep-rooted goal we have to make a positive difference in the communities in which our members live and serve.”
The concept of community service has evolved over the years. “In FFA’s early years, it was simply following the lead and direction of others, such as advisors or other leaders,” Keith says. When the Building Our American Communities (BOAC) program began in 1970, FFA began to recognize chapters for community development. “The biggest difference between community service and community development is at the completion of development activities, students should totally understand the entire process. In community service, students may only feel good about participating.”
Jim Armbruster, now team leader for the FFA Awards and Recognition Team, was involved in BOAC as a chapter leader, winning state BOAC titles in 1989 and 1991. “The BOAC program was developed as a way to recognize local chapters for participating in and developing community enhancement projects,” he says.
Armbruster’s chapter ran a multi-year project to reconstruct an outdoor cactus garden and classroom that was part of the county fairgrounds. The students and other volunteers cleaned up the area, identified and cataloged all the cacti, and constructed an outdoor classroom and amphitheater still in use today. “The work my students did is still providing a benefit to the community,” Armbruster notes. Although the BOAC program ended in 1995 when funding ceased, many chapters still work on these projects. Yet now, the Living to Serve program takes community development even further.
Living to Serve
A relatively new program, “Living to Serve: Developing a Habit of the Heart,” is a federally funded program focused on developing, implementing and evaluating community-based service-learning projects that meet an identified community need in rural communities. Grants are available to chapters wishing to support a rural community with 10,000 or fewer community members through a service-learning project. Funding of up to $3,000 is available. While the specific grant is for small, rural communities, the principles of service-learning also work for suburban and urban communities.
When Todd Biddle came to Cumberland Valley High School in Mechanicsburg, Pa., as a new teacher and FFA advisor, service-learning was an early goal. “We did a lot of field trips and fundraisers historically, but not necessarily true service-learning projects,” he says. “I wanted our chapter to engage in a quality service-learning component where they are giving back to the community while learning technical field information and skills simultaneously.”
Biddle’s chapter became involved in a community project called The Adventure Zone playground, a community project to build a handicap-accessible playground. The Cumberland FFA was able to use their existing skills in landscaping and landscape design with a grant from the Living to Serve program to design, implement and maintain the playground area’s landscaping. The chapter continues to maintain and develop the site.
Today, Living to Serve provides teachers and chapters concrete ways to use service-learning as a way to build skills and help others simultaneously. “Service-learning is a skill and a thought process that will stay with students throughout their lives,” Biddle notes. “Just think of all the organizations that survive and thrive off of community support.”
For more information about how to incorporate service-learning and Living to Serve projects into the life of your classroom and chapter, visit ffa.org. You’ll find links for lesson plans, chapter grant applications and information on the Living to Serve webpage.