August 28, 2018
The Importance of Volunteers
This past Thursday and Friday, we had the pleasure of meeting with our State Extension Advisory Council (SEAC) members. For those of you who are new to our system, SEAC is the advisory council to me and your state level Extension administration team. It is made up of Extension Board members who are elected to SEAC by their peers throughout our system. To learn more about SEAC, please visit http://www.ksre.k-state.edu/boardleadership/about-ksre/seac_home/Index.html.
Our host local unit was K-State Research and Extension Johnson County, and we enjoyed hearing about and discussing the programming efforts in Johnson, Wyandotte, and Douglas counties. SEAC’s impressions of those programming efforts are shown in the accompanying whiteboard photo. We had many other discussions about issues related to our Extension system, and I will share those with you in the weeks to come.
My theme today, however, is on the importance of volunteers to K-State Research and Extension system. Every SEAC, Extension Board, and Program Development Committee (PDC) member is a volunteer. A great number of our Extension programs, services, and activities – including many of those discussed at last week’s SEAC meetings – could not exist or would be far less impactful without volunteers. They volunteer their valuable time because they believe in our impact, programs, projects and activities, our system, and our mission. To all of our volunteers, I want to say thank you for your dedication to our mission and the people we serve. I ask my Extension professional colleagues to do the same.
In keeping with this theme, I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to our SEAC member volunteers: Karri Johnson (Sedgwick County), Secretary Cindy Bervert (Shawnee County), Sandy Jacquot (Douglas County), Chair Larry Justice (Johnson County), Don Hellwig (Dickinson County), Brandon Vering (Marshall County), Carmen Crandall (Doniphan County), Lisa Long (Wabaunsee County), Bruce Leisy (Wichita County), Cody Woelk (Greeley County), Chair-Elect Nathan Leiker (Cottonwood District), Marvin Beesley (Golden Prairie District), Joel Sprague (Frontier District), Treasurer- Elect Jerry Hall (Wildcat District), Greg Davis (Greenwood County), Jim McClung (Cowley County), Evan Winchester (Seward County), Lora Kilgore-Norquest (Finney County), Gary Snyder (Edwards County), Dave Twiner (Pratt), and new Ex Officio Chair Richard Poland (Barber County). A further thanks to former Ex Officio Chair Jody Bartelson (Wildcat District) for the years of leadership you provided on the State Extension Advisory Council!