Building community: Normal FFA Chapter wins national award at convention

INDIANAPOLIS — Creating flower planters for Mother’s Day may have been a small activity, but the results were large when the Normal FFA Chapter was selected as the national winner for Building Community.

Chapter members were honored for their activity during the recent 93rd National FFA Convention and Expo.

“It’s been a crazy week,” said Liz Harris, FFA adviser and ag teacher at Normal Community High School.

The Beauty in Reusing project was initiated by a group of students that are environmentally minded and focused on sustainability.

“We were looking for something to do at one of our chapter meetings and one of the students came across this idea on Pinterest and decided to implement it,” Harris said.

“The students took reused items and created flower planters to give to their mothers on Mother’s Day,” she said. “They used cans, clothes pins, pieces of yarn and painted some of the items before planting flowers in them.”

FFA members chose a couple of different designs and looked for items around their houses they could utilize.

“They had to modify a little bit based off what was available and that was a good experience for the kids,” Harris said. “And the mothers were excited when they got these gifts from their kids.”

This small activity, Harris said, has sparked additional activities in the school.

“We have a group of students working to increase the recycling in our school,” she said. “Now we are only doing paper because of the cost of recycling.”

Another group of students is focused on developing a composting initiative.

“COVID has put a road block there, but we’re hoping within the next year or two we’ll be able to implement that,” Harris said.

Seniors Kelsey Kern and Madelyn Hubble developed the video about the flower planter project that was sent to the national judges prior to the convention for judging.

Chapter members gathered for a watch party during the virtual FFA convention for the announcement of the award and tied it to a social event on Wednesday evening.

“We painted pumpkins for Halloween and the night took a little longer than expected,” Harris said. “It was different because we weren’t on the big stage, but we got to see a lot more of where people come from within the FFA.”

The Normal FFA Chapter, with 120 members, has been slowly growing in size since it was restarted for the 2010-2011 school year.

“When Normal West High School opened the ag program went there,” Harris said. “So, we’ve built a lot at Normal in a short amount of time.”

This is the second year in a row that Normal FFA was nominated for the Building Community award.

“This year was the first time we won and we were blessed to have that recognition twice,” said Harris, who is in her seventh year of teaching at Normal.

Last year, the chapter conducted a Towels for Howls project where the members collected old towels and blankets to donate to the local Humane Society.

“That project started the same way as our activity for this year,” Harris said. “A student saw a need, wanted to get involved and brought it to the other students in the chapter.”

Harris appreciates the creativity of her students.

“I’m not that creative, but I work with students with amazing ideas,” Harris said.

“Our chapter is a little different than a lot of other chapters,” she said. “We hardly have any farm kids. Our kids live in the city, so we have to look at things a little differently to work for us.”