Sacramento 4-H takes to the national stage

An innovative 4-H program developed in Sacramento will be featured on American Graduate Day 2014, a multi-platform PBS event broadcast live from Lincoln Center in New York on Sept. 27. It can be viewed on the web at http://americangraduate.org/grad-day and on participating PBS stations from 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Eastern Time.

American Graduate Day is about the nation's high-school dropout crisis and the organizations working tirelessly to combat it. Producers found out about Sacramento's 4-H On the Wild Side program, in which trained teenagers work in partnership with adults to plan and implement a two-night camping trip for elementary school students. The teenagers learn leadership skills and get a chance to make a difference in children's lives; and the children get a chance to sleep outdoors and experience nature first-hand.

“I got to look at the stars. I saw the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, and the Milky Way. It looked like a line of milk and glitter,” said one camper.

To tell the nation about this program, American Graduate Day 2014 has made arrangements for three Sacramento representatives to travel to New York City next weekend to be panelists on the show. They are Marianne Bird, UC Cooperative Extension 4-H advisor; Gayle Craggs, a Twin Rivers Unified School District teacher and 4-H On the Wild Side leader; and Bonnie Lindgren, a 4-H member who was an On The Wild Side teen leader for four years. (Lingren, 2014 McClatchy High School graduate, is now a freshman at Carleton College in Minnesota.)

Media contact: Marianne Bird, (916) 875-6423, mbird@ucanr.edu

For more information, see the attached PDF documents: