Future Farmers of America
Governor James Baxter Hunt, Jr. describes his experiences in high school as a member of the Future Farmers of America (FFA) and how the skills he acquired in FFA assisted him when he ran for student government at NC State.
Interview on 2012-05-29 00:00:00 -0400
Transcript
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But the organization, the FFA, Future Farmers of America,
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was a leadership organization
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and in addition to having all kinds of farm project activities
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-mine were always dairy cattle-
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we also had parliamentary procedure contests.
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You'd have a team of about five or six people.
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I was the president of the team and you'd go through parliamentary procedure exercises,
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open a meeting,
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take motions, amendments to the motions,
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appeal the decision of the chair;
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you learned all this parliamentary procedure stuff
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that most people never learn.
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Most citizens don't even know how to make a motion correctly.
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They have no idea that it requires a second
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and that you can amend it,
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that you can appeal the decision of the chair
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and let everybody vote on whether or not the chair made the right decision.
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I learned all that stuff in parliamentary procedure.
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They also had public speaking contests.
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Of course I represented my school in public speaking
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and went up several layers in terms of that.
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o in that particular farm youth organization
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I learned a lot about leadership
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and about how to speak and how to engage in
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meetings and work to get things done,
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how you go about getting action taken in the way you think it ought to be done.
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All of that of course served me very well when I went to North Carolina State University
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and ran for student government after a few weeks on campus.
This video is an excerpt from a longer interview. Contact the Special Collections Research Center to request the transcript of the full interview.
