4-H Experience

By JS, Age 15, with Olivenhain Valley 4-H

I’m 15 years old,and I absolutely love 4-H. In 4-H, I do many different projects such as archery, photography and community service. I also attend Southern Youth Summit and LA County’s 4-H summer camp.  Regardless of what I’m doing through 4-H, I always have fun.

4-H has taught me how to be a leader. For the past three years, I have gone to Southern Youth Summit, a weekend conference where young 4-H members learn everything it means to be a leader. At the summit, the youth attend sessions run by teens and adults. These sessions teach a variety of things that help someone become a great or an even better leader. The sessions I went to at this summit have taught me how to manage my time, how to communicate to a group, how to manage any stress that comes from being a leader, and over all to have fun when I lead. For the past two years, I have been apart of the planning team for this amazing conference. Being apart of the planning team means that I worked with adults and other teens in order to create a successful conference. This year at the 2019 Southern Youth Summit, we had a session on mindfulness The mindfulness session taught me, along with all the other conference delegates how to identify when we are stressed and ways we can deal with that stress. We also had a session taught by a guest speaker, a futurist, in which we learned that even as kids, we have the power to cause the world change for the better; our actions do in fact have an effect. All in all, this conference was inspirational, educational and a blast! In addition, as I said earlier, I also go to LA County’s 4-H summer camp. I have been going to this camp since I was nine years old, and have loved going every year. 4-H Camp has also taught me a valuable lesson: You can make some of your lifetime best friends in a week. 4-H Camp isn’t like any other camp.  It’s a place where you can have fun and meet new and amazing people. I am happy to say that I have met people from all over California and the United States at this camp, who have become my best friends. They are friends who you can always rely on and who will always care about you, no matter how far away we live from each other. I almost always recognize camp friends at other 4-H events. People say Disneyland is the happiest place on Earth, but I beg to differ. When you show up on the first day of camp and see your friends, you are the happiest person in the world. No other place can make you feel this happy. When Friday comes it's graduation night. The night where people graduating out of 4-H have their friends give a speech about them and the memories they shared. Graduation night makes lots of people cry. They cry for various reasons. Some cry for the graduates, some cry because they’ve spent the whole year keeping in their tears and they decide that they can finally shed them. Some people cry because they know that they have to say bye to their friends until next year, and some people cry for all of those reasons. So in short, camp is the best place on earth, where you can be yourself and no one will judge you. Where you not only make friends, but a family. All in all, 4-H is the best thing to ever happen to me, it has given me life and leadership skills and some of the greatest friends I could ever ask for. I love 4-H.