(Atlantic) On Saturday December 2nd, 2023, FFA members Addison Freund, Claire Schoreder, Maddy Anderson, Mia Kloewer, Braden Wood, Lauren Comes, Keston Schmidt, Frank Freund, Collin Harris, Lily Willrich, Claire Comes and Addalyn Sonntag traveled to the FFA Enrichment Center in Ankeny, Iowa to attend the Ignite and Amplify FFA Leadership Conferences. Members from all over Iowa attended the conference, which taught them about leadership and student development.
IGNITE Conference focuses on the Endless Opportunities: Careers in Agriculture What’s Behind Door #1, discovering FFA Opportunities. The next workshop was Fuel Up! Managing Emotional Fuel Tanks. Common Ground workshop was learning Diversity & Similarity Among FFA Members. Next is Pay It Forward learning how Servant Leadership and Service Planning can help our community and finally, Follow the Leader: Leading with Integrity.
AMPLIFY Conference focuses on student development. This year the conference focused on Purpose: Connect. Care. Create. Establishing a purpose as a daily practice and draft a leader purpose statement. Discovering how people are connected to purpose and identify their talents. Members also learned to discover what it means to live to serve as a leader and examine methods for serving others while pursuing purpose. All of this while Identifying the value in practicing practical self-care as a leader and discovering the difference between living with purpose and completing action items. To wrap up the conference, each member drafted a personal purpose team and identified how to live out a purpose plan at home.
FFA Advisor Eric Miller said, “These conferences are important to help develop the kind of leaders that we need in our school and community. I am glad the Iowa FFA provides us with the opportunity and the students are so willing to give their time to become better leaders.”
Submitted by: Lily Johnson, Atlantic FFA Reporter
