Tape #452 - Rural Youth, Coalition Building Self-Esteem

 

Even though we try to pretend we're adults but I think some of the things that we'll talk about can apply to different organizations and different age groups as well.  I'll start by introducing myself.  My name is Megan Pretent.  I'm originally from Northeast Nebraska where I grew up on my family farm and now I'm a junior at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln majoring in agricultural education and I'm also an active member of the Alpha Delta chapter of the Sigma Alpha sorority which you'll learn quite a bit more about as this workshop goes on.

 

And my name is Sarah Greer and I'm senior at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln also and currently president of the chapter Signa Alpha chapter on our campus and we're going try everyone in the audience introduce themselves and tell why they're here and we'll try to get the cord to reach around, but if not speak loudly.

 

Hi, I'm Emily O'Hara and I'm from Maryland and I'm this year's dairy princess and I'm here to learn all that I can about agriculture and what it's going to turn out to be like.

 

My name is Deb Summerall and a recent graduate of the University of Florida and I am an agriculture reporter in Frederick, Maryland and I'm here covering the conference. 

 

Hi, I'm Debbie Ausler and I'm from Elsie, Nebraska which is a very small town in the same state they're from.  And I been married to a farmer and helped with the farming for about five or six years and so I'm still learning.

 

I'm Marsha Speets and I'm also from Central Nebraska.  I have three children that are almost all feed are out the door, our one son is still not quite done with college yet at University of Nebraska, but I'm also a youth worker in our little town of 300 people in Phillips. And I'm here to get more ideas how to bring our kids back into our town and maybe into farming or agriculture and what we can do to just keep the kids around the little towns.

 

I'm Carolyn Roppe, I'm from Ohio.  I'm a member of the National Association for Family and Community Education which is an organization of primarily rural women.  We develop programs to help educate rural women in leadership and community projects.  I'm presenting a workshop tomorrow on Coalition Building -- How you go about that, so I thought I'd come and see what you had to say. 

 

Hi, my name is Shelia Green.  I am the National Federal Women's Program Manager for the Natural Resources Conservation Service which is an agency within the Department of Agriculture.  My purpose for being here this afternoon is to serve as moderator for the workshop to make sure that each of you speak clearly into the mike and to ensure that the presenters have the things that they need. 

 

I'm going to change the geography a little bit and I'm from Nova Scotia in Canada.  And we have a dairy farm at home and convener for agriculture for the Federated Women Institutes of Canada.  And we have two sons and a daughter on the farm at home. 

 

I'll go a little further.  I'm from Australia from Victoria.  I'm a journalist here and I'm covering the conference.  And I'm interested in what we can do to encourage you to get back to stay in our country areas too.

 

Hi, I'm Karen Oliver and I'm principal at the senior high school  of 650 13-17 year old, so I guess my reason for being here is pretty obvious. 

 

Hi, my name is Tammy [inaudible] and I work with the [inaudible] in Indianapolis, Indiana which involves young people that want to be involved in agriculture.  So I'm here to learn.

 

I'm Jo Back and I'm also from Nebraska.  I'm interested in starting a sigma alpha chapter on our campus for our young women there, so that's why I'm here.

 

I'm Diane Hughes I was from Canada now from Australia.  And I'm the chair of a board of an agricultural college in Australia.  Also have children of my own and we're cattle producers so I've got an interest from a few areas. 

 

Ok, thank you and if we have stragglers that come in later, we'll try and subject them to this too ok. 

 

Agriculture is just starting to open up for women and it's a lot better than it was like ten, twenty years ago, but there still are a couple of problems that women face like for instance I had a personal experience in this.  Walking into a agriculture production class where there's 50 men and you are one of two women.  That's a little intimidating and but its like not getting recognized by professors or getting recognized for the wrong reasons.  Sometimes that makes women want to rethink their majors, think oh, you know, if this is the way it's going to be then I don't want to be a part of this and it's a little overwhelming.

 

Oh before I have another little story.  Before I went to college I was telling someone I that I was going to go into agronomy in an agricultural college and they were like oh gee you're going to get your mrs degree.  At first I didn't know what they meant and everybody else started laughing and ok is that part of graduate school.  Finally I caught on.  Well, sometimes women in the agricultural college and in the field hear a lot of these problems. 

 

Basically what we want to make sure that you know is that what we face on campus is maybe not quite as extreme as many older women have been facing for many years, but it's still the same stuff.  It's still the same demographic, it's still the same stereotypes and all of those types of things that women in agriculture all over the world face as far as gender discrimination.  And one of the things that we've been fortunate enough to be involved with on the University of Nebraska campus is the Signa Alpha chapter.  And its technically its a sorority, but I don't know how many of you are familiar with the Greek system that we have on university campuses in the United States.  What kind of impression does the Greek system do you have.  And you can be completely honest?

 

Not a good one.  I belong to Sigma Phi Alpha at the University of Florida and actually what it was was an off take of the little sisters of Alpha Gama row so a lot of the fraternity and Greek people that I came in contact with were just like me, but most of them are more the power hungry type may I say.  But that's the kind of impression that I got off of them.

 

On many campuses in the United States the Greek system that sororities and fraternities don't necessarily have a very positive image.  They're known more for their drinking parties than they are maybe for some of the more productive things that they really do do.  We're not trying to bash that system because we know a lot of people that are success stories out of it, but we want make sure that you know that Sigma Alpha is different in that we're professional sorority. 

 

This is something that we found and we feel like it represents us, not bricks and mortar but working business relationships.  We offer some of the benefits that social sororities you typically think that they offer friendships, networking, leadership opportunities, but we have a strong focus on agriculture and UNL and at other campuses across the United States Sigma Alpha is what works for a lot of people who don't want the social scene, but want to find people that they can relate to, that are in their same major so that they can have a common bond with a lot of people.

 

The history of Sigma Alpha.  It was started at Ohio State by five women in the 70's and they were looking for a social setting with women that were in the agricultural field and they looked around for a group or sorority and they didn't find one so they just decided to start their own.  And that's when they got the idea for Sigma Alpha and they got it together in less than a year and it's really amazing what they did with only five people in less than a year.  They had a lot of help from their college and their administration.  It was just at Ohio State until 1984 when Perdue started the second chapter and from there it's grown quite a bit for only being around for about twenty years.  And currently there is 28 chapters across the United States and four sids and a sid is a sorority in development. 

 

We'll talk a little bit more about sids and about sororities and Sigma Alpha and those kinds of things later.  One of the other things that we want to address is that as women specifically women in agriculture, there are a few things that have been identified as focus areas that women need support in, women need to feel confident in in order to become leaders in their field.  Especially in a field like agriculture that is traditionally dominated by men.  These are networking and support.  We've grouped those - we'll start with networking and support.  We've grouped those together because they kind of go hand in hand.  We're also talk about some workplace training, some community outreach, leadership development and education. 

 

I'm going to start by talking about networking and some of the importance.  The relationships that women have obviously I know that you feel they're important as we do, because you're here.  You are at a conference like that to get to know other women and other people that are in your similar situation.  that you have things in common with; that you have similar backgrounds and you also have similar goals and similar dreams.  And making identifying those people a little easier takes a lot of the work out of networking.  One of the overheads that I really like has to do about women serving as mentors.  Women serving as support systems, women helping other women excel and create those network systems.  One of the other things that women find very important or are very important is very important to women as someday I'll get this right.  You'd never guess I was education major.

 

That are important to women in finding leadership roles and developing leadership is support and self-esteem.  If a woman doesn't believe in herself, she is not going to ask other people to believe in her.  And so the support network and the peer network and the mentor relationship  that sigma Alpha helps encourages, are one of the ways to help women that have those talents and have those abilities, use them. 

 

One of the things that is important to us is to let others become what they can be.  What we know that they can be and give them the support and understanding and the self-confidence to be that themselves.

 

Our chapter at the university ties in with the support and networking quite a bit.  We have what we call big sister, little sister program and that basically we just like transfer students and upper classman and lower classman, we pair these people up so it helps with the transition coming to college, showing them around campus, meeting faculty members and things like that.  We thought we'd bring some slides to make it a little more interesting.  These are some girls that just got together for lunch and talked about problems they had and just give each a lot of support. 

 

A big thing about Sigma Alpha is since it's a national chapter, we do have conferences, we have a national conference and a regional conference and this is just a picture of some of our girls at the national conference and it was held in Dallas.  This you can meet members with agricultural majors with any kind of major all across the country you find out what they want to go into and you also, the alumni of Sigma Alpha are also are invited to this.  It gives the alumni a chance to catch up and as graduates of college who are already in the industry.  It gives them a chance to maybe get another job to help each other out with jobs like the good old boys network. That's kind of what we're trying to do here.

 

And there's also an alumni association and the alumni associations are just they just actually just started up about five years ago so they're pretty new.  They're just there to network as graduates, as people in the industry and also to help out the local chapters in any way that they can with problems that they maybe having or like help undergrads out with internships and such.

Our next area of interest is workplace training and as many people have talked about throughout this conference, one of the things that women need in order to succeed in an industry such as agriculture is a firm knowledge and a firm background in what it is they're doing.  What it is they're trying to achieve.  And well - when you're in college, you go to classes and you do your homework and all those kinds of things because that's what you're trying to do.  But there are things beyond the classroom that the classroom doesn't teach that we are fortunate enough that we have through peer relationships and some of the programming that we can do to bring some of that stuff that doesn't quite happen in the classroom into the education of our members.  And I'm going to let Sarah talk about what it is we educate about.

 

One of the things that the founders really wanted to stress was academic excellence.  A requirement to be a member is that you have to maintain at least a 2.25 GPA on a 4.0 scale and anyone in our chapter there's many members that have about 3.75 and above on the 4.0 scale so I guess it's not really a problem with the girls that want to join, but it's just like a [inaudible].  Chapter starts to go off course about wanting to be more social or something that can have a base to go off of.

 

Being a Sigma Alpha we have access to conferences such as the Nebraska Women in Agriculture Conference that Nebraska women host every year and conferences such as this.  Megan and I found out about this through our advisor from Sigma Alpha. 

 

With an academic excellence having members that really care about their GPA, I know when I came in I wasn't all that serious about my studies, but just having people that you saw and looked up to that were on the dean's list every year and got honors, it helped me study more and it helps to have people that you can look up to.  And another thing that we have in our group is round table discussions and we bring in professional speakers and have resume workshops.  Here's a slide of our other advisor, she's giving a resume workshop which is really really helpful with job interviews and such.  And here's a slide of a speaker from the industry that we brought in.  We've had a couple of women like that to talk about their job, problems they face, problems that we, you know how to deal with certain situations.  It's really helpful.  It answers a lot of questions that maybe you just don't want ask someone in an interview.  Is there sexual discrimination on the job and you know what should I do about it?  You just can't ask that. 

 

Our members also give presentations about something they've learned in class or they went to a conference and they'll come back and present it in front of the whole group.  It's really informative.

 

Through Sigma Alpha we have the opportunity that if one of us finds out about something, we can share it with 30 other girls that, it might something that would benefit all of us and by having that communication base and that organization, we can spread the word a little bit faster.  One of the other things that is really important to us is motivation and being involved in our communities.  We all know that when you go to college its not only the grades and how you perform in the classroom, but it's what you choose to do with your time outside of class.  Whether that's have a job or whether's that being involved in your community or whether that less advantages things that many college students do. 

 

So being involved in campus is a good way to build your resume and face it we're all in college to get a job.  And so building our resume is something pretty important.  That might be the motivation of some of the people that join the organization, but before long they realize that there is a lot more to it and the community involvement and some of the more philanthropy type things that we do are also beneficial to self and while it looks good on a resume, most of the girls are doing it by the end of their first year because they really want to.  They see the need and they see the role that they can take in fulfilling that need.

 

This is something that we found.  We wondered why somebody didn't do something and we realized that we were somebody.  One of the good things about being in ag sorority is we really promote agriculture in Lincoln which is the capitol of Nebraska and a lot of people there don't really know anything about agriculture, you know.  The state fair, they'll go and see their first cow, you know, things like that.  So we try to promote agricultural activities. 

 

One of the things that we started is called ag Olympics.  And it's something just like its a money maker that we started for the crisis hotline and we'll have different events like wheel barrel racing and five gallon bucket race, bail stacking, you know, things that farm kids can do and we open it to the community end of the college and the proceeds and donations went to the farm crisis hotline and we feel that's important because it's someplace where farmers can call if they're stressed, if they have a question, if there is a family crisis and they don't know or they don't want to talk to someone in their community because they're embarrassed.  It was startling and we really felt we could help out by donating our time and getting some money.

 

And we also like to help out the children in the community.  In the past years, we have done a bowl-a-thon for big brothers, big sisters and that's another thing that we get to know each other better.  We get to help out people and we get to have fun.  We try to do fun things because if you don't fun things with each and get to know each other then you just like another agri business club or another animal science club.  We want to try to know each other on a personal basis and feel that's really important.

 

Another Megan volunteered at the child advocacy center once and I don't really know much about it. 

 

It's just another organization in the Lincoln community that a group of us actually decided that we would use Sig Alpha in name, but we could really help benefit the community. 

 

Our next thing that we want to talk about or our next point is leadership and we leadership is something that's very important to every industry but specifically the ag industry.  In that a lot of things that happen in agriculture happen in government and those of leadership positions, but a lot of things, even more things than happen in government in agriculture happen in community-based organizations, grassroots organizations that are run in communities and small towns across the country and around the world.

 

These organizations need leaders if they want to be successful and Sigma Alpha is one of the training grounds for leaders.  Specially, a lot of our leadership through our organization because it is all women are focused more toward women.  When men look at leadership they look at power.  That's really all that statistical men are looking for power.  That's how they view leadership.  Whereas women are more likely to view leadership as a way to encourage change, if there is a situation that they don't like they're more likely to seek a leadership role so that they can change it.  Or to empower others for ideas, kind of build a group or maybe a little more constructive compared to the other gender.

 

Finally one of the things that's important to organization if they want a change is to have continuity and progression in their leadership.  An organization that has the same leadership and the same officers for 30 years is going to be doing the same thing that 30th year that they were doing the first year.  And so especially in community organizations and in agriculture, new and talented leadership is very important.

 

I guess that's one with being a college organization, you're always having people joining and people graduating so everyone gets a chance to be involved and to take an office or take a leadership position, take assistant positions.  And I think those of some skills that most people are going to use for the rest of their life.  It's required to use parliamentary procedure in our chapter and the officers have duties and responsibilities and the members also have by-laws that the members have to follow.  It just build skills that you can use for the rest of your life.

 

The final point that we have that is important to women is education.  No only education of women themselves, we kind of talked about earlier.  The education of the other people that are out there, not only female peers, but are male peers in the industry as well as some other people outside the industry just about agriculture in general.  And so one of the advantages of a group like Sigma Alpha is that it brings together women that are interested in agriculture as a cohesive body.  When a group like Sigma Alpha makes a statement on campus, that's 30 women representing women in agriculture that are making a statement, its not one person and so people stand up and listen a little bit more when you say something as a group. That's one of the things that come out of this conference is that and especially the first one, I believe I picked up over the last couple of days that after the first conference in Australia, the foundation for Australian ag women was formed and to look at them as a group and as a delegation here it's obvious that that made a difference.

 

And it sounds like there will be some more efforts made in that direction in the United States and in other countries in the world too.  Sigma Alpha is something that already started to make a statement like that on college campuses across the United States. 

 

And we've noticed that at the University of Nebraska campus there hasn't been one monumental change where people are oh my gosh women can be successful at agriculture.  It's nothing like that.  It might be just one less comment someone makes about a girl in a classroom that's speaking out answering questions or might be one less time when someone is getting discriminated against.

 

One of the things with Sigma Alpha and with the national organizations, it is a national organization and in fact we've talked to representative of the national board and I know many of you are from international places that are in the room this afternoon and they're excited about the possibility of making it an international organization and beginning chapters in Canada and in Europe and in South America and in Australia and all over the world because of the difference that Sigma Alpha's made on ag campuses in the United States.  We really feel that it's something that could benefit campuses in other countries as well.

 

However, even though we're represented by a national board that sets standards and by-laws and those types of things, there's minimum standards and minimum by-laws when it comes to the actual chapters, they're very individual and Sarah's going to talk about that.

 

Our chapter is more professional where some chapters like at Perdue and Louisiana State I believe they're more on the social side.  They like to do more activities with the fraternities and sororities and that's fine.  And there's some chapters that are in between.  That's one of the nice things about it and when you go to the national convention, you know you get to hear all those different sides of the sorority. 

 

Another thing I'd like to talk about is how individual our members are.  We have members who live on campus, off campus, we have members who are married with children.  We have members who are freshmen through 5 1/2 years seniors, been there a long time.  And we have all different kinds, even though its an agriculture sorority not all of your members have to be in agriculture.  I think the national board says like 80% or something and they said that are willing to work with that.

 

So it's nice if you have a question like when I mentioned a little something about animal science, I know who to go to and when I need to know something about water science or natural resources or ag education, it's nice to know who to talk to, you can ask them hey where do I get information and it's just nice to have all of these ideas and different ideas and different people, it just makes it a lot more interesting and a lot more fun.

 

Earlier we mentioned sids and we told you were going to talk about that a little bit later.  A sid is called a sorority in development and its basically a trial period.  If a group of women and faculty advisor on a university campus that has an ag program and it can be a community college, it can be a four year college or whatever, it just has to have an agriculture program so that it has ag majors to be in its membership, decide that they want to start a Sigma Alpa chapter, you start what's called a sid.  We hosted informational meetings in our own chapter and we're not that old to try and encourage some other schools in the state of Nebraska and some other women at the University of Nebraska to participate. 

 

Basically to begin a sid, once you have a group of members that want to go through that process, contact the national board and its six to twelve months process that has some specific rules, but basically you act like a Sigma Alpha chapter, you look like a Sigma Alpha chapter, you'd just aren't quite one yet.  It kind of like a trial period.  Just to see if there is enough sustainability to make it a long term commitment on campus.

 

Well this just about wraps it up.  We just wanted to tell you what works for us, what works on our campus and has worked across the United States we think fairly well.  And like we said this is just one example of what can work to help promote women who are pursuing agriculture majors and want to get involve in this field.  I guess if there are any questions we'll be glad to answer them or if you would like any information you can come up and talk to us. 

 

Oh we almost forgot about our door prize drawing.

 

We have been on campus at the University of Nebraska for three years and the first eight months of that were as a sid and then we became an actual chapter and so we had rush a couple of times and had members graduate and brought in new members and it's growing quite rapidly nationally, but we're growing quite rapidly at the University of Nebraska too, so we're pretty excited about that.

 

[inaudible]

 

Ok, Jo asked about the six to twelve month probationary period.  That's actually as a sid.  In order to become a sid a chapter has to have or prospective chapter has to have a minimum of twelve members and one advisor and they have to gain organizational status on their campus.  Basically they have to go office of student involvement or something like that and say that they want to be an organization and follow their particular institution's rules to do that.  And then they'll officially become a sid and couple of representatives from the national board will go to your campus and talk about the process and basically you do some fundraisers, you do some community service activities or philanthropic as they're called.  Some of them have to be ag specific.  You also have to do some professional development programming for your members and then once you meet all these standards and you submit the report then once you make it through that process, which generally takes about eight months but depending on whether you start in the spring or the fall, sometimes you have a dead summer in the middle that makes it a little longer.  Then you've met the requirements to be an official Sigma Alpha chapter.

 

She asked if we had graduates who has seen the benefit of being in Sigma Alpha.  Well we had a bunch of graduates in May, but we only had four before that and even then when they went out into the job market and realized that you know they were kind of all alone now after they'd had that support group, that support group was still there, even though they're in four different states.  Through various communications methods that support group is still there.  We were also speaking with one of the national board members when we got here.  She actually works for the SDA and she commented that one of her intern candidates was a Sigma Alpha from a university different than hers, but as an alumni she recognized that and was willing to stick out a little effort just to help, because she knew she was coming the Sigma Alpha background and would be a good candidate.

 

I actually have a couple of questions.  I really like what you're doing and in our college which is only small I was wondering how many, what percentage of your students are usually are interested in being involved?  The other question is I think its unfortunate to restrict it to only females because our young guys could benefit equally and I think a lot of our problems with the leadership that we have which is basically by men is because they haven't had the sort of development as young men so they've just done the best that they can do. 

 

I'm not sure percentage wise how many members of the University of Nebraska college of ag are actual Sigma Alpha members.  I'm not sure how many majors we have right now.  We have chapters that have eight members which is less than what they had as a sid.  All the way up to chapters that have 60 members and so that's regardless of campus size or regardless of enrollment.  I think we're growing, we haven't started to see a decrease in membership so its becoming a bigger thing on our campus and we fortunate in that respect.

 

As far your second question.  I guess in the United States we have four at the University of Nebraska, but there are couple of others nationwide that are fraternities that are specifically geared toward young men who are ag majors and so many of them choose to take that leadership route.  We are also fortunate that we have many campus groups and organizations that are active on campuses whether they are major specific or whether they are activity specific and so that allows for interaction of young men and young women in share those leadership roles in those leadership positions.  Sigma Alpha was started specifically to help women excel more in that climate.  Also I think most of the ag majors I know come out of either FAA or 4-H program and so that previous development as youth has helped them understand both genders are equally able in leading groups.

 

The first question was reason I wanted to know the percentage and I guess you can't tell me that, but if we only have maybe 40 female students and 60 male students, I was just wondering out of a hundred how many we might expect to show any interest in being involved and the second part was in Australia where I live we have to send our kids away to boarding schools and a lot of people for some reason or another choose to send their girls to girl schools and boys to boy school whereas I wanted mine at a co-ed because I want my daughters to know how to intermingle with the guys so that they don't feel threaten when they get in that situations.  So I'm glad that you do get interaction because they's important.

 

I agree and thank you for giving a little bit more background information.  I don't know depending on the information that's presented, you could have all 40 of your female majors that want to participate or it might be something that might not be very interesting or exciting to them at all and that's something when there have been groups that applied to be a sid sometimes they haven't had their support.  One of the things that we have been fortunate to have we have two advisors who will bend over backwards for us and are very supportive.  We also have an administration in our dean's office that are very supportive of us as an organization and are willing to recognize us for things that we do and so when we show up in the campus newspaper or the dean mentions us in a speech, there are other people that take notice and they take a listen and one of the other things that we try to hit on was that Sigma Alpha tries to individualize itself towards each campus.  It's not a group that trying to look for people just like them.  We're looking for new and interesting people that represents the entire group of women in agriculture and so the type, the concerns that you've exhibited are very real and are something that need to be considered and I'm sure that if you're interested in starting the sid process, that someone from the national board would help you work through that and find a system that works at your university or your college.

 

Are there any other questions?

 

[inaudible - not using microphone]

 

Thank you are there any other questions.  Ok.  She asked how many chapters we have.  We have twenty-eight chapters that have full chapter status right now and we have four sids that will be activated sometime this next fall semester.  We're growing.  There's been 60 chapters since we became a chapter three years ago.  In the last ten years it's double nationally, its triple actually nationally. 

 

She asked if we had contact in -- yes we do, a lot of our members are on a list serve and we share ideas back and forth ideas about fundraisers, questions about problems in the organization through the internet and most of our groups have websites.  One of the reasons that we had a door prize other than to recruit some people to come listen us was so that we could get all of your names and addresses and rather than send or give you a packet now that is going to get put in with the packet that you've gotten in every other workshop and every other speaker and every other meal you've gotten this week, we're going to wait a couple of weeks and then we're going to send you a packet so that it's new and interesting information. 

 

And it will be on top of the stack instead of in the middle somewhere.  And we will include in that contact information with both the national board people...

 

END OF TAPE