A New Era for Kentucky FFA
While FFA members were waiting for the champion livestock winners to be announced at the 2025 Kentucky State Fair, the Kentucky FFA Foundation was making a big announcement of its own. At a news conference this past August, the group announced a historic $11 million donation from the Bill Gatton Foundation that promises to enhance the state’s FFA program for years to come. This generous gift is the largest monetary donation ever given to an FFA Foundation anywhere in the United States.
A Kentucky-born entrepreneur who passed away in 2022, Carol Martin “Bill” Gatton is well known to Kentuckians, not only for his business acumen, but also for his financial gifts to support higher education and help future generations find success. “Bill Gatton is one of our state’s most well-known philanthropists,” says Sheldon McKinney, executive director of the Kentucky FFA Foundation. “It’s impossible to measure the impact he has had on countless lives through his giving.”
Gatton also had ties to FFA, serving as the Kentucky FFA state president in 1950. Today, his foundation is helping to expand access to FFA activities for current and future FFA members. Funds will be placed in an endowment to ensure the gift keeps on giving for years to come. Funds will be used in a variety of ways, including to increase prize money for state winners of Career and Leadership Development Events and to bring more students on a Foundation-led bus tour to the FFA Washington Leadership Conference each year.
Additionally, the funds will enable enhancements to the FFA Leadership Training Center and the FFA camp experience, which is much-loved by generations of Kentucky FFA members. “If you surveyed leaders in Kentucky who were in FFA, they’ve probably all had an FFA camp experience,” McKinney says. “It’s the home and the heart of FFA in Kentucky.”
Each summer, about 1,500 FFA members attend FFA camp to develop leadership skills and plan for the upcoming year. The training center will now be known as the Carol Martin Gatton Kentucky FFA Leadership Training Center and the donated funds will help provide additional scholarships for individual members and chapters.
Finally, some of the donation is being put into Forever Blue endowments, a program set up by the Kentucky FFA Foundation to allow individuals to donate to specific causes or local chapters. These endowments will benefit the Muhlenberg and McLean County FFA chapters, which reside in the area where Gatton’s family originally farmed and where he gained career and leadership skills as a member of the Sacramento FFA Chapter.
