"That's all fine and good, but why don't you tell us what you're doing in 4-H?"

The angry question came from a committee member at a recent Extension Advisory Committee meeting in Danville, Minnesota. Extension Educator Susan Timmons had just given a progress report on "4-H Friends," the program she was helping to manage that was targeted to immigrant youth and other youth of color.

Susan was taken aback by this outburst. The committee member seemed to think that 4-H Friends had nothing in common with 4-H, and that 4-H was being neglected because of the attention on 4-H Friends. Susan tried to explain that 4-H Friends was a part of 4-H, and that the traditional 4-H program was still active, but the committee member didn't seem satisfied with her answer.

When Susan got back to her office later that day she sat down at her desk to think. Even though the criticism of 4-H Friends was hard to take because she had invested so much personal energy into the program, she knew she had a responsibility to consider the committee member's question, especially since it reflected concerns that she had heard from others in the community. The question prompted Susan to think over the successes and challenges of 4-H Friends, and to consider whether the Extension Service was taking the right approach to youth programming.

Susan Timmons worked in Hamilton County, an area of Minnesota that was undergoing dramatic social change due to the recent influx of immigrants, migrants, and refugees. Her job as an Extension educator was to help the Extension Service provide services to the immigrant, migrant, and other historically marginalized groups in the community.

Susan was well qualified for the job. She had an advanced degree in social work, had done community development work in Mexico for four years, and was fluent in Spanish. She had a strong interest in the needs and concerns of Mexican immigrants in the U.S., as well as of immigrants from other countries.

Susan came to her new job in 1998 with limited knowledge about Hamilton County. From the newspaper, radio, TV, and conversations with Extension staff, she learned that it was a rural area, with agriculture and livestock production being the primary industry bases. The largest town in the county was Danville (pop. 10,000), where the Extension office was located. One-fourth of Danville's population worked at a large meat packing plant outside of town that processed locally produced hogs.

Extension Service staff told Susan that the population of Danville had begun changing dramatically five years earlier. The long-term residents who worked in the packing plant gradually left for large urban centers that offered better paying jobs. The vacant packing plant positions were filled by migrants, immigrants, and refugees who came to Minnesota primarily from Southern Texas, Mexico, the Sudan, and Laos. Non-Caucasians currently comprise 25 percent to 30 percent of Danville's population, making it one of the most ethnically diverse towns in rural Minnesota.

When Susan started her job she visited a number of social service agencies in town to introduce herself and learn more about the experiences of the local immigrants. From these meetings and conversations she learned that the immigrants employed by the packing plant did hard physical labor and worked long hours. In many families, both parents worked at the plant at different shifts and rarely saw one another. Often the older children had sole responsibility for their younger siblings for long stretches during the day. Many of the immigrants in Danville lived in trailer parks that were in poor condition.

The children of immigrant families sometimes had a hard time adjusting to their new life. The young children, being a little more socially flexible and adaptable, fared better. But the teenaged kids often struggled, feeling isolated and confused among their Caucasian peers. Many of them had little hope for their future. When they spent time with their friends, hanging out after school and speaking their native language, they sensed that the long-term residents were suspicious of them. The kids knew that there was a strong fear in the community that they were forming gangs.

Two years before Susan started her job, the Hamilton County Extension office had launched the 4-H Friends program for youth of color. 4-H Friends was modeled after the traditional 4-H program and has the same main goal: to give young people learning experiences they would not otherwise get at home or in school (Exhibit A: Photograph). The program was funded by a grant written by the Extension educator who held the position before Susan. When Susan started her job, it struck her as odd that the Extension Service had developed a separate program for nontraditional youth. "Doesn't segregating kids go against the main mission in diversity programming of encouraging inclusion and integration?" she wondered. But before drawing any conclusions, she decided to spend some time observing and listening to the kids.

A few months after being hired Susan took four Hispanic kids to a meeting of county officers of 4-H community clubs. When they got to the meeting and saw the room full of Caucasians, the kids hovered near Susan, anxious and fearful. One boy clung to her shirt and whispered: "Don't make me go in there." Susan led the whole group in activities that put all the young people at ease, but she was struck by how frightened the Hispanic kids had been in the beginning. She began to understand the need for a separate club: these young people just weren't ready to spend all their 4-H activity time as minorities in a large group of mostly Caucasians-first they needed to develop a better understanding of the purpose of 4-H and gain more confidence in themselves and their skills.

Initially there had been strong resistance in the community to the idea of 4-H reaching out to nontraditional young people. Susan had heard from her predecessor that some of the parents involved in 4-H had made negative comments in the early days of the 4-H Friends program, such as: "4-H is not about diversity," "Those kids (youth of color) will be here today and gone tomorrow," and "You're forgetting the farm kids." The general feeling among many people involved in the traditional 4-H program was that resources were being diverted away from them and toward the youth in the new 4-H Friends program. While people had gradually become more accepting over time, Susan still sensed some negativity, as was evident at the Extension Advisory Committee meeting.

The resistance to the 4-H Friends program reflected the general uneasiness among long-term community members about the influx of migrants and immigrants. It angered Susan that people were so unwelcoming. As in many areas in rural Minnesota, a large number of the local residents were descendants of Scandinavian immigrants, who came to the U.S. in the late 1800s to escape poverty or religious persecution in their homelands. She thought: "Don't people understand that their ancestors were immigrants too, and that they faced many of the same problems that today's immigrants do?" At the same time, she could appreciate how the long-term residents, who used to be part of a tight-knit community, wanted to hold on to their way of life and cherished traditions, and why the influx of newcomers with different cultural backgrounds seemed threatening to them.

Susan had gotten a lot of support for her diversity programming work from Extension's state office. Several diversity leaders at the state level had given her valuable ideas and strong encouragement for her efforts in Hamilton County. But Susan sensed resistance in her local office. While there were a couple of staff members and adult mentors who were dedicated to 4-H Friends, she didn't feel the office as a whole was committed to the work of making Extension programming more inclusive. The overall feeling she got was that the local office considered the immigrants to be "the problem." To Susan, the newcomers had brought new conflicts and concerns to the community, but had also brought new ideas and talents that could benefit the community.

As Susan sat in her office after the Extension Advisory Committee meeting, she thought about the ways that 4-H Friends had been successful. First of all, participation had increased dramatically. In the beginning of the 1997-1998 year there were 16 members; by the end of the 1998-1999 year membership had increased to 65.

The program had also given youth positive learning experiences. Susan could think of several "success stories" that had happened in the last year. There was this year's Youth Leadership Extravaganza, where 400 4-H members came together from all over the state. Four kids from the 4-H Friends program attended the event and had a positive experience. One boy, who had been withdrawing socially and experimenting with drugs before the Extravaganza, came back from the event with a much more positive attitude.

There was Juan, an artistic young man who had recently received recognition for his art work. Juan had done a lot of gardening in his home country of Mexico, and had been participating in the 4-H Friends gardening project at the local community college. He expressed his love for gardening in a painted insignia of flowers and people that represented 4-H. His piece had been selected for an art exhibit in Washington D.C. (Exhibit B: Daily Globe Article).

Another success was this spring's youth soccer tournament. The Extension Service had helped to promote the tournament this year, with the result that there was strong participation from youth of color. In 1997 and 1998 3.3 percent and 8.3 percent of the participants were youth of color, respectively; this year 24 percent were youth of color. Most of those kids were from the 4-H Friends program.

Susan then recalled several 4-H Friends disappointments. For example, the previous summer 45 kids in the program entered foods projects in the county fair. Half of those kids entered ethnic dishes that the judges weren't able to evaluate because they weren't familiar enough with African, Asian, and Mexican cuisine.

Another disappointment happened last summer when some of the immigrant youth were not able to go to camp as they had hoped, because their parents refused to sign their children's permission slips. The parents were fearful of their children spending so much time with strangers.

Susan thought that there were a number of basic limitations inherent in the 4-H Friends program. There was the challenge of parental involvement. Parents of children in the traditional 4-H program participate by guiding their children through their projects, helping them locate and purchase materials for their projects, and providing transportation to events. Unfortunately, the parents of migrant and immigrant children were often unable to help their children because of their long hours spent at the packing plant. Furthermore, in some cultures parents don't traditionally play an active role in structured learning activities with their children, and so asking them to do so was going against their cultural traditions. Since there was less parental involvement in 4-H Friends, Extension had relied more heavily on adult mentors. Many of the mentors were now getting "burnt out" from working so intensively with the 4-H Friends members over the last two years.

Another challenge had to do with the financial support of the kids in the program. Some people involved in the traditional 4-H program thought it was unfair that the 4-H Friends youth sometimes received financial assistance or sponsorships to participate in certain events. Susan tried to address these concerns by setting up several fundraising events so that 4-H Friends youth could work to earn some of the expenses for their special events and trips.

In 4-H, extensive record-keeping and notebook writing are tools used to evaluate participants' work. Many 4-H Friends kids were unable to keep detailed notebooks because of their limited English writing skills, making it difficult for adult leaders to give them feedback by the usual 4-H methods.

Reflecting on the limitations and challenges made Susan wonder whether an existing program such as 4-H was the best method to help the nontraditional youth in the community. Many of the challenges for the 4-H Friends program had to do with the simple fact that the youth of color came from different cultures and had different needs than the Caucasian youth. "Maybe it would be better to develop a new program that is specifically designed with immigrant youth in mind," she wondered. Rather than trying to adapt an existing program that was originally developed to serve mainly white, middle-class youth from farm families, maybe an entirely different program should be developed for the young people of color. One way to develop programming might be to ask immigrant and migrant youth and their families what they think their youth need, and then to develop programming based on those needs.

There was no way to know exactly what the benefits of a new program would be because it had not yet been tried. But Susan guessed that participation might be better, it might be more effective in providing nontraditional youth with positive learning experiences, and it might invite less criticism, because it wouldn't be compared to an existing program.

But developing a new program would require more funding. Susan would have to write additional grants, with justification for additional funds. It would also be labor intensive and time consuming. She would have to interview families and kids, and work out innovative ways that a program could meet the needs of the youth. She was already swamped with her regular Extension activities and didn't have much extra time to work on additional projects.

Susan certainly couldn't carry off these efforts alone. She wasn't sure she would get enough support (in the form of staff time and commitment in the local Extension office) to get a new program off the ground.

Should Susan continue to promote the 4-H program as the primary youth program for nontraditional youth in her community, or should she encourage the Extension Service to support the development of a new program(s) that more closely fits the needs of these youth and their families?