Masters of Youth Development Serve in Prevention | Episode 043 Feat Katie McFarland
Hey, welcome back to another episode of Party Talk where we empower leaders in youth drug prevention. Today’s guest is Katie McFarland from Salmon, Idaho, a small rural town. And she has a master’s in youth development. And she works with her local coalition and the 4-H club, all to get youth involved in healthy safe activities and develop leadership skills. So she shares a ton about, you know, throwing alternative activities for youth, fundraising, and then also developing leadership skills that students want and get excited about. So enjoy this episode of the party talk podcast. Katie, do you mind introducing yourself to everybody on the party talk podcast?
Get to Know Katie McFarland
Sure. I’m Katie McFarland, I was born and raised here in Salmon. And I have participated in a lot of the programming that we now do and prevention when I was younger, and I worked with University of Idaho extension and Family and Consumer Sciences, so I get the opportunity to work with youth and families in the area and Prevention’s is big part of that.
Okay, awesome. And I had heard too, I don’t know if it was from your bio, or if Amber told me, but you’re also involved in the four H program? Yes, the four H program is ran out of our extension office here in Lemhi. County, and I have served as the four H program coordinator and a four H leader. I was a four H member. And now I have three kids and for each so very involved in the program.
Oh, that’s so cool. And I was actually out to dinner with Sharon and her family who brought me in. And they were they were just speaking so highly of for age, all the leadership skills that students develop, and even that they could potentially like pay for college by being in the program and raising animals and like auctioning them off and stuff, which I It was wild to me. Can you tell me a little bit about that? Because to me, that was the most interesting fact. I learned the whole time.
What is 4-H club?
Yeah, so a lot of people think that forage is just livestock. But it’s not. It’s a lot of different things. I took a lot of leadership programs. When I was in 4-H, there’s a lot of opportunities for teens to go to national conferences, to state conferences, to do leadership development programs, there’s actually a Leadership Project, which is really cool. But then the flip side of it is the livestock. For example, my kids take beef and swine, and chicken and goat and the beef and swine, they raise them up from young animals in the spring, feed them and take care of them all summer long. And then when they are ready to be harvested, they auction them off at the fair and people pay per pound for the animal. And then they are taken off to harvest and they get to take that meat home. And then my kids put that money in their savings account to get ready for college.
Yeah, that is fantastic. And to have them have the responsibility of raising an animal doing something every day developing discipline and long term thinking. That’s just that’s just awesome, even from the prevention field. So how did you get involved in the prevention side of things? What happened there?
Katie’s Grandma was one of the Founding Members of the Coalition!
Well, I’ve known sure and my whole life, her kids and I grew up together. So I was involved with some of her programming from an early age. And actually, my grandmother was one of the founding members of the coalition a long, long time ago. And up until her passing, and it was a big part of her life. She was a recovering alcoholic, and felt very strongly about preventing those kinds of issues in our community. So I had been involved with her for a really long time. And then as they moved into my professional position, I had an opportunity to work more with the program.
Wow. Okay, cool. So what is your involvement look like? Right now? Kind of day to day or week to week? What are you doing with that?
Well, it’s kind of it’s kind of hard, because a lot of the programming I do is prevention, but officially stuff that I do with our coalition and with the FYI, I’ve worked with Amber to do youth programs, I have been providing alternative activities to drugs and alcohol in our community for about 15 years through my four H program, and a grant program and entrepreneurship program we had and then we merge those programs with DF y. And so now I assist her with those alternative activities and the fundraisers to get these kids to amazing conferences and experiences. And I also get to help with leadership development with the drug for youth leadership team. I get to come in once a month and help kids develop leadership skills that they can use in DF y and outside of DF y with peer to peer prevention programs, and then also help them develop their vision and mission for the year and how they can plan out their activities to be eat the most effective.
Wow, that’s awesome. And I’d got to see that, you know, because I was there doing an assembly for the school, I met your students at the CADCA Prevention Conference in Dallas, and then got to do some sessions with them yesterday. And, and just the maturity, the camaraderie and the initiative. Like if anybody is listening, you’ve heard her say drug free u and d, f y. So we all love our acronyms. So that’s the same organization. So Sam and drug for you. And if you go on Instagram, and type in Sam and drug free youth, you will see how involved and engaged these students are. And it’s incredible. I had the I had the best time working with them. And it was so fun. And I can just see, like all the work that you and Amber and Sharon have been pouring into your young people because they are on fire for the work. And it’s a family. It’s really, really cool.
Highschool Students Involvement with the Coalition
Yes, they’re amazing. I go in, we’ve had trouble scheduling with the high school schedules changing. So we are now meeting at 6:45pm after kids have after school activities and everything. And these kids are coming excited at seven o’clock at night to talk about visioning and action planning. So that’s how dedicated they are. Because you cannot get a group of teenagers to come in at seven o’clock on their free time to talk about action planning if they don’t really care about it.
Oh, absolutely. Wow. That’s actually cool to hear people kind of ask that question of, hey, when should I do it schedules are so busy. And you’re showing that a if you have the right students, and they’re committed, and you’re pouring into them, they’ll find or make the time even coming in at seven at night on a on a school night. So that is awesome. You’re doing something right over there, if that’s the case. So I would love to know, you mentioned a few things. So alternative activities, and then also helping them with leadership and fundraising. Let’s start with the leadership and fundraising. What are some things that maybe students when they come in to the prevention world? Maybe some of the leadership skills they’re lacking? And that you’re able to help them with?
One of the Skills their Coalition Offers is, Public Speaking.
Yeah, so we do a survey at the beginning of the year, when we have a lot of new leaders come in, and we asked them like, what what do you need? What do you want to learn? What can we offer you and one of the big things is public speaking, they’re all a little bit nervous, which you wouldn’t notice now looking at them, they’re all just naturals up there. But they do want help with public speaking and how to do that. They wanted me to teach them how to be inclusive there, it’s really important to them that DFI isn’t seen as this special organization. And it’s set apart and you have to be something that you may feel you’re not to be a part of it. They really want it to be all inclusive. And so we talked about inclusivity, and how to strategically include other students and make sure they feel welcome. So we’ve done some trainings on that. And just focus on how to be organized and make make a plan because that can be challenging. There’s so many great ideas, but we can’t do all of them. So right to focus on what we want to do and what we want to accomplish.
Okay, that’s good. And I love how you, you leave it open to them. It’s not like, Hey, here’s the curriculum for the year, we’re going to teach you this. It’s one of the things that you want to learn and you’ll be excited to learn and you feel is a need. Because then they’re bought in from the beginning. It’s already right. It’s like, Hey, you listen to me, like Katie’s shows up, you know, and to do this work with us, and she listens to what we want. That just increases the buy in right there too. So that’s great.
Yeah, I always people like to say they do things for you and to yours, but we like to do things with you.
Activities and Ideas that Your Coalition can try!
Yes, exactly. I love that. And what are the what are the activities side look like for the alternative activities, maybe just brag on any of the programs that you’ve been excited about, or the students have loved? That people could get inspired by?
Oh my gosh, they do so many really cool things. We always have a last day of school Movie Night. And we do it outside with a giant inflatable screen, rain or shine. It’s usually a little chilly. But we sit out on the lawn and we put up a big inflatable screen and watch a movie and that’s been really fun. We have a drive in movie that we do in the high school parking lot at the beginning of the school year. We usually have a swimming pool party where we watch something like Jaws there in the swimming pool. We tried to make it really fun. The kids have been awesome. They’ve started having after parties for things like prom and homecoming and it’s been a great alternative to maybe some other less healthy activities and they get to go hang out. We have a local coffee shop that is really supportive of the program and they open up and let the kids just come and hang out and and have some fun drinks In and chill with each other after a party, and it’s been really successful. We have a New Year’s Eve movie at the movie theater where we rent out the movie theater. We’ve rented out the bowling alley, and then we have a really big family event that’s not geared just towards teens. In August at our Lumpkin County Fair. It’s called family fun night. And we bring in inflatable activities like bounce houses and obstacle courses. And we have about 800 people come and participate in that every year. And DFI has a booth where they do face painting and we talk about prevention and our set our coalition gets to do a survey with the community about how they feel about prevention and and what we can be doing to improve. And so it’s kind of a really big deal. And that’s the program I’ve been working on before I joined DFI so this is our this was our 15 family fun night this year.
Wow. That’s incredible. I, you know, it’s cool. It’s like you mentioned how your grandmother actually started the coalition. And here you are today, like still continuing the legacy. And these incredible things are happening. And something that I was struck by was Emory told me that y’all might have like 15, to 20 core leaders who are really committed there every time. And then when you have some extra time or an event in the school, like a meeting, basically, there might be as many as 45 students that will show up and be involved. And that there was kind of like the leadership group that’s held to a very high standard. They’re doing a lot of different things. But then that inclusive atmosphere that you’re developing, is bringing in even more students up to 45. No matter if they use drugs or not. Or if they smoke or drink, like you’re welcome because they need the information. And then you have these events and activities for the entire school. So your whole scope of work is really reaching a lot of people and even like you said, 800 community members, specifically for that one, or maybe for any of them, what has been some of the things that you’ve done for marketing that have worked really well, to allow you to have a big presence in the school or in the community like that?
What’s Worked for Marketing for Katie
Well, Amber is amazing at marketing, she makes some really beautiful flyers. So we put up on social media, she’s really talented with that. A lot of it is word of mouth with our teenagers. So you know, you get a few kids excited, then they get their friends excited, and they bring their friends in. And we talk a lot about our DFI leaders making personal invitations to those kids who may be on the fringes and don’t feel included. So reaching out and saying, Hey, I think you’d really like the haunted house, you should come to the haunted house with me and things like that. So that works really well. We’re really small town. So marketing is a little bit limited, but also very effective. Social media is a great way to reach our younger people. And then for family fun night, we’ve been doing it for so long, I think it’d be harder to tell people, we weren’t doing it than two hours doing it that, you know, an advertisement in the newspaper. And we go on our local radio for a program called Voice of the valley, that’s kind of a talk radio show and, and some ads on the radio and social media. And people come because they want to participate. They want to support these kids, they want to do these activities. And they want an alternative to some of the other activities that they may be getting into. You know, it’s easy to get bored in a small town. So it’s fun to go out on a Friday night and go bowling with a bunch of crazy kids.
Fundraising: Sponsors and Grants
I love it. Oh, so this comes to the final part that you mentioned, which was like helping them fundraise. And one thing when we were talking about fundraising and some strategies to help out, it was just brought up that hey, like Salmon is a small town, you know, maybe 6,000 to 10,000 people depending on the time of year. And so the same businesses might be asked to sponsor or to donate. So how do you approach and fund you know, all this great work that you’re doing? What are those sources? And how do you get get the funds to do all this great stuff?
Well, our salmon Substance Abuse Prevention Coalition does have a grant that funds that program. Some of those funds go towards our drug for youth program and all alternative activities. So we’re we’re pretty sustainable that way. We also have a program in the spring called salmons got talent and it’s a local talent show. And we get sponsors for that and then take money at the door. That’s one of our big sustainability fundraisers. And then for the DF y for them to travel. Amber is very passionate about getting as many of those leaders involved as she can to go to some of these national conferences and get training and experience and that can get really expensive. And so we have to do a lot of fundraising mainly for that, to get those youth to places where they can and do some really cool development. So we work on a couple of different things. We had a haunted house this fall that just, you know, at Halloween just a couple weeks ago, that we use as a fundraiser for that we have a black tie dinner event where most of our DFI are very talented. And they sing, and they play piano. And we’ve got a lot of great talented kids. So they provide entertainment, we have really nice dinner. And we use that as a fundraiser or some of our events. And then we’ve done some, just general fundraising like, hey, we want to get these kids to Washington, DC, and this is what it’s going to cost, you know, who can help out. But yeah, fundraising is a really big challenge. We’ve got a really big, big ask this year to get our kids to Washington DC, as many kids as we’d like. And so it’s been a lot of work and, and the haunted house was a really big push that the kids worked really hard on and, and just different things, we try to think outside the box of ways that we can raise some money and not just do the same old thing. I
don’t think this is just a job for you. Or for Amber or Sharon, like it’s much more. So what keeps you just like passionate about this, you’re willing to go above and beyond and say like, we’re gonna make this really successful. I’m just curious what’s driving you for all this?
Well, for me, when I see the kids that excited about it, I can’t tell them no, it’s like, it’s the bit, it’s gonna be the difference between Yeah, we’re gonna have a haunted house or not. But we need adults to come at nine o’clock at night and freeze their tails off selling hot chocolate to make that happen. And I’m gonna make that happen, because they’re passionate about it, and they need the support. I’m just really passionate about youth, and I want to see us be the best that they possibly can. I have a master’s in youth development. And it’s really important to me to see these kids succeed. And if they’re passionate about it, then I just want to support them.
Yeah, and it is so rewarding. Like, I think about the stuff we quote, have to do for the job, right? The bare minimum. And that’s okay, that’s fun. That’s good work. But everything extra, like the time extra spent with the leaders watching them grow and do the events like, that’s where you really get the most out of the job, too. It’s like, not only is this meeting me, and my family because it’s a job. But my soul is lifted out when I see these students doing great things and having them implement the ideas and growing and like lives are being changed because you’re starting this work early. And it’s going to continue improving their lives for the rest of their life. Because they’re building a really strong foundation. Is there anything that you think, a tip or anything that you would give to other people in the prevention fields that can be helpful, whether it’s a mindset, a tip or anything like that, that you want to end off on?
Well, I really think that people need to meet use for their apps. Not try to think that this is what I was like when I was a kid or this is what I think they should be doing or how it should look. But be flexible and open to what works with the youth what speaks to the youth, what they’re interested in, and how you can support that rather than developing something to hand to them.
That is great. Thank you so much. This has been an episode of Party Talk where we empower leaders and youth drug prevention today with Katie McFarland from Salmon, Idaho. So we’ll see y’all next Monday for another episode.
