The FFA motto is “Learning to Do, Doing to Learn, Earning to Live, Living to Serve,” and no one exemplifies that statement more than FFA Alumni who serve our communities to help improve the future of agriculture. One specific leader who exemplifies this is Bayley Kearney, who is familiar with “Living to Serve” and how it has impacted her life.
As a child who grew up in a small community on a farm in western Kentucky, Kearney learned many things that led to her position today. “While I was growing up on the farm, my passion for protecting people came from watching people on farms,” she says.
As a young girl, she watched her dad and other workers get injured on the farm, come home and fix it, then go back to work the next day like nothing had ever happened. When she saw this, Kearney knew that one day she wanted to help keep people safe.
Now, Kearney uses this passion of helping protect people in her role as a Health, Safety, and Environmental (HSE) specialist for the Chevron Corporation. As her title implies, she helps people be safe, healthy and protect the environment. She comes up with ideas to ensure Chevron complies with safety and environmental rules by creating programs to help eliminate daily risk factors on the job. By doing this, she helps keep people and large parts of the environment safe from harm.
While she was still living at home on the farm, she learned more about people. “I first learned to talk to people from different walks of life,” she says. This helped improve her communication skills and her ability to talk and work with all kinds of people. In her position, she continues to use the skills, such as thinking on her feet, that she learned while she was an FFA member and meeting people on the farm.
One time, people who held very high leadership positions at Chevron came to her workplace and spoke with several individuals about their projects at that time. At the last minute, before they left, Kearney was tapped on the shoulder and asked to present hers. She credits this flexibility to lessons she learned while in FFA. “Adaptability was a huge skill I was taught in FFA that I still use,” she says.
Kearney is a good example of the leader that all FFA members can become if they set their hearts to it. Her advice to FFA members is to “take every opportunity as it comes, because you’ll never know what you want to be if you don’t find what you don’t want to do.”
