Leader Training

Working with the 4-H over the past couple years has been great. Crazy at times, but great! Every year we have a couple really big events that take months of preparation. These events include, but are not limited to, County and State Fair, enrollment time, officer training, and leader training. This months big undertaking was Leader Training. We’ve been preparing for months and months. In fact, the original date set to hold the training was in September, but due to HUGE last minute changes on the state level, we had to reschedule.

Leader Training is an evening when all the organizational leaders for each of the clubs comes to the extension office where we feed them, give them their update packets for the year, and discuss and explain any pertinent information. As part of this process I had a few major roles; 1) to put together these huge update packets for about 50 clubs, and 2) figure out what to feed everyone, get all the stuff, and make it. I got the packets completed a couple days ago, but waited to pick up the food so we wouldn’t have to store it for long. Gay-Leigh, the person that basically makes the office run, and I decided to make pulled pork, baked beans, salad, and cookies. I had found this great BBQ pull-pork recipe that cooks in the crockpot with little or not attention that I thought would be perfect. So I dropped by Sam’s Club last night to pick up all the food stuffs to be prepared in the morning.

I’m pretty sure I pissed off the butcher guy because I asked him for 30 lbs. of pork roast and then asked for him to cut it in thirds since it was soooooo huge! The guy was like, “No, I don’t want to cut my fingers.” Yet I protested, until finally pertinent information came out in the conversation. The package actually contained TWO porks! He thought I was asking him to cut each into thirds, when really I wanted the seemingly one giant package cut into thirds… Sooooo, the guy happily took it back and cut each of the four porks (cuz we had two packages) in half.


So after all the hard work, preparation, and collecting of crockpots (I think we had 10?) the evening was finally here. I showed up early, and trimmed the pork, mixed the seasoning, and placed the porks in their crockpots. Then I went back and decided to consolidate the porks into FEWER crockpots…which was a huge mess. In the end, we fit all the porks in the three largest pots. There was another class using our room during the day, so I had to set everything up to be out of their way (look at all that food!)


Next, Gay-Leigh and I worked on setting up the tables, chairs, and materials in the room. It took a few tries, but we got the setup figured out. People were going to be squeezed in pretty tight, but that’s just the way it was going to have to be since we didn’t have a bigger room. Packets would be picked up in the hall, while additional information was available along the side counter in the room. We set up the registration and food tables out in the hall to create a better flow in the small space.

Then the onslaught began. Crazy early people started showing up at like 3:30 pm for the event that started at 6:00 pm. Thankfully, some started helping with our last minute preparations, like setting out the food, pulling the pork, manning the registration table, and just helping with general tasks and things.

After the few pictures that I dutifully took while preparing, I TOTALLY spaced taking any other pictures the whole evening! (Bad Kyndra…BAD!) Needless to say, everyone really enjoyed the meal (all except one, who knew what we were having ahead of time, but still felt she needed to complain—disguised as a “recommendation.”) We had an incredible amount of pulled pork (damn I wish I had taken a picture…) and plenty of everything else. However, it turned out to be the perfect amount to have enough left over for the office to have lunch the following day and for a few to take a little home.

Though I spent a 15 hour day at work, I was glad that Leader Training was over and had the highest attendance ever! Now we have Officer Training to look forward to in November. Yikes! I better get started, that’ll be even more of a pain since we’re dealing with kids.