The National FFA Organization on Thursday announced an ambitious plan for increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion at the group, the largest student ag organization in the nation. The announcement came just weeks after a FERN investigation examined FFA’s decades-long failure to diversify its staff and membership.
The plan, which FFA says will be implemented by the end of 2021, includes a range of structural and cultural commitments to enhance the participation and leadership of racial and other minorities among its members and staff. Some of the plan’s elements, like adding a staff position dedicated to diversity efforts, address demands made by members and alumni over the summer as part of an effort to push FFA to address its long legacy of inequity.
“We want everyone to feel welcome in FFA and know they have a place to belong. It’s critical for our members to feel welcome, safe, and celebrated as their authentic selves,” said Mark Poeschl, chief executive officer of National FFA, in a statement announcing the plan, Agricultural Education for All. “Making a welcoming environment is important for our organization and for agriculture as a whole.”
As part of the effort, FFA plans to release annual reports on its staff and leadership diversity and member demographics. FERN’s reporting found that 70 percent of the organization’s members and nearly all of its professional staff are white. The percentage of Black members in FFA has remained the same, around 4 percent, since at least the 1990s.
FFA also plans to work with North Carolina A&T University to digitize the archives of the New Farmers of America (NFA), an agricultural education program for Black aspiring farmers that was taken over by FFA in the 1960s. FFA alumni told FERN that although they had been taught that the NFA takeover produced positive outcomes for Black participation in the organization, in reality, Black membership declined significantly in subsequent decades.
Xavier Morgan, an FFA alumnus who has been involved in this summer’s organizing effort, says the platform has “good beginning steps” but cautions that the decentralized nature of FFA means that local, state, and district leadership must buy into these changes for members to see real reform. “I hope that National FFA includes members from underrepresented communities in these ongoing conversation[s], as well as expeditiously having a Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity leader joining the organization at the Executive level,” Morgan said over email.
Morgan’s recent efforts to reform the organization were spurred in part by FFA’s equivocating response to this spring’s racial justice protests following the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police officers. “I would still encourage National FFA leadership to understand that Black Lives Matter is not a part of a political agenda but a movement that promotes equal rights and inclusiveness for all people,” Morgan added. “The future of our organization and our industry is depending on it.”
The full Agricultural Education for All plan can be found here.