Marin 4-H clubs merge into countywide organization

Elisabeth Wade says you haven’t lived until you’ve seen a child deliver a PowerPoint presentation on how to birth a lamb.

“They look like little business presentations,” said the Novato resident, a Marin County 4-H Club project leader who teaches public speaking and rocketry. “I love it because it’s such important skill building, and it’s a skill that everyone is going to need.”

The 4-H program — a national nonprofit that operates at local, regional and state levels to impart lifelong skills to children and teens through hands-on experience — has undergone a sea change in Marin.

The county’s approximately six community clubs have been restructured into one group following a yearlong trial run. The change has expanded the amount, and content, of activities available to participants and reduced barriers to families looking to get involved, according to 4-H leaders. A grant from a local nonprofit has further helped boost membership.

Steven Worker, the 4-H youth development adviser for Marin, Sonoma and Napa counties, said the countywide club model was instituted in order to ease the learning curve for new families and reduce the administrative burden on the club leaders, who are often parents.

One way these barriers were reduced was through a gift from the Miranda Lux Foundation, a San Rafael nonprofit focused on vocational education. The $25,000 donation in September will allow the $75 annual enrollment fees to be waived for up to 300 youth members and 75 adult volunteers.

“This should help open it up to people and families who wouldn’t be able to participate otherwise,” Worker said.

Worker said the COVID-19 pandemic lowered membership to about 125 to 150, compared to around 300 before the pandemic.

Additionally, while there are around 170 subject areas youths can explore — activities such as knitting, canning, gardening, raising livestock, dairy farming, public speaking and rocketry — each community club often only offered a small subset of projects. Before, a child would have to find a specific activity of interest and search for a club that offered it.

Now, participants join Marin 4-H and search the online catalog for the activity. The projects are still located throughout the county; a family, for example, may have to drive a few towns over for a child to do a project on beekeeping.

“There’s really room for literally anything a kid wants to do,” Wade said. “Being able to do these different things was really appealing. It’s something that can kind of grow with them.”

Diego Mariscal, a regional 4-H coordinator, said the range of projects allows participants and parents to experiment with their interests.

“So if you’re not sure your youth is going to be an artist or you want them to try a STEM program, it gives you an opportunity to sample different content areas,” Mariscal said, referring to science, technology, engineering and math.

Wade said there is a bit further to go in getting club members into the countywide mindset. She said getting club leaders better versed in all the projects in the county would help, and noted that the centralization of information is a step in the right direction.

“I find that in Marin, if we go to Novato we see the Novato kids, if we go to San Rafael we see the San Rafael kids, so I think there’s less cross-pollination than I think they were hoping for,” Wade said. “They’re still thinking in terms of the community club. I think that’s the growing-pains part.”

Previously, while some projects were open to youths from other clubs, it was often left to the volunteer project and club leaders’ discretion. It was also up to adults and kids to find those projects.

Mariscal added that community clubs often had their own identity and culture, which could intimidate children and families.

“By having this remodel we’re actually opening things up to more resource sharing and for families to sample various programming,” Mariscal said.

Wade noticed this herself, and said that when more activities were offered, kids seemed to expand their horizons. She said some clubs were more project based, meaning they only did one activity, which left little option to explore other hobbies.

“When we went countywide, all of the sudden the shotgun kids were checking out other projects in a way they hadn’t necessarily thought of before,” Wade said.

Marin 4-H plans to expand its programming in areas like STEM and soccer based on comments from the community. Mariscal said understanding how urban and rural communities might differ in their needs is essential in program development.

“We’re trying to ensure that we meet the needs of the community,” Mariscal said.