4-H Manitoba’s theme for the 2017/2018 year is ‘Community Engagement and Communication’ and with the variety of incentives these past few months that’s exactly what 4-H members were involved in!

Executive Director, Clayton Robins, says it’s been an exciting time for the 4-H Clubs with cooking and art being included in the programming.

“We started a few initiatives that had a lot of community engagement and engagement with the public,” says Robins.  “One was a food challenge competition which is very similar to what you see on TV where the competitors open up a basket of goodies and have to prepare something for a panel of judges. That was a regional and provincial competition that really went over well,” he says, “and that will be carried over in January in 2018 and hopefully into the future.”

“To celebrate Canada 150 we also coordinated a regional competition with art canvases for our club members to prepare, to tell the story of 4-H over the last 100 years in Manitoba.  That went over well too!  We had ten regional competitions, provincial finals in the fall and the canvasses were on display at the Keystone Gallery in the Manitoba Legislature for the whole month of November, all through 4-H month.  So, we were really excited about that!”

The Manitoba 4-H Canada 150 Art Challenge ran between June and October with 34 clubs submitting a total of 37 entries.  20 canvases advanced from the Regional Competitions to the Provincial Finals. The panel of judges included Minister of Agriculture Ralph Eichler, Dan Mazier President of Keystone Agricultural Producers, General Manager Ron Kristjansson of the Provincial Exhibition of Manitoba, and City of Brandon Mayor Rick Chrest.

The 4-H clubs that placed in the top 5 standings are as follows:
The Roseland South Brandon 4-H Club landed first place in the competition. Second place was Dand Belles et Beaux 4-H Club with Gladstone Handiworkers 4-H club landing third place.  Fourth and fifth place go to The Pas Helping Hands 4-H Club and Lundar 4-H Beef Club respectively.

Go to the following link to see pictures and videos of the 4-H Manitoba Art Challenge:  www.4h.mb.ca/4-h-manitoba-canada-150-art-challenge-finals

Robins says new clubs have been started up this past year with new incentives to make the program bigger and better.   He says they try to be very adaptive and try to stay with the development pillars when programming.  

“We encourage clubs in this current 4-H year to make the extra effort to be involved in their communities and let us know and share those stories!” he adds.

Visit the Manitoba 4-H website at www.4h.bm.ca