State Board Training......

Since it is almost time for our next State Board Meeting of the Nevada Farm Bureau, I figured it was about time to report on the last one. ;)  Okay, so I had good intentions of doing this a long time ago, but as you can see from the background in the first picture, it was just a couple weeks before Christmas and life was hectic and then I had Orlando--okay, you get the idea.  This meeting was not our usual state board meeting.  This meeting may have been a pivotal one for many of our board members.  I know that our Lincoln County FB Board meetings have taken on a new dimension because of it.  We are setting and working on goals that will hopefully make a lot of great and needful changes to they way the Farm Bureau is seen and  utilized.

So, AFBF sent in Jill Casten to give us a day of training at the Atlantis in Reno.  Jill helped our state board see that we needed to really start to have a shared focus--the importance of a mission statement and what it says about an organization.  We started by forming ideas of what goals we have as a Farm Bureau and then tried to combine those ideas into a mission statement.  We read through a few from other organizations and one thing that stood out to us all was that no one read through the entire mission statement of one of the organization's because it was way too long.  SO our focus was to make it direct and concise and really get our point across.  The power point screen picture shows the ideas that we need to focus on to generate the goals that are the basis of the organization andd which will be the foundation for the mission statement.

Another activity that Jill had us work on was coming up with good things that had happened for Nevada Farm Bureau in the past three years (all the post-it notes on the top half of the time-line)  and then the not-so-good things (post-it notes on the bottom half of the time-line).  This really helped to give us an idea of what has been going on in the organization, and when and why--which helped to illustrate why those things were good or bad and how we can avoid, change, or grow on them.

We really worked on a lot of great ideas, we were divided up into different groups and different subjects to work on long-term goals for the Farm Bureau and what needs to be done to accomplish them.  One thing that really made me happy was to see how many times building the YF&R program came up.  This is an exciting thing for me since I have been working so hard for that for the last few years to really show the board what YF&R is and why it is so important to be building.  I really felt that we were moving forward and seeing progress in this area, along with quite a few others!

A great tradition of NVFB is that when we have an evening at meetings such as this or at a national conference, we usually go to dinner together, which is a great opportunity to really get to know each other well outside of the meetings.  THis time was no exception and we met for dinner and had a great evening of visiting, eating, and even more eating!  Though most of us were a little picky about the oysters (BLECH!!!) The calamari and kobe beef appetizers were great!  And Paul Young, of Austin was able to amaze the waiter as he put away the waiter's choice for him of a 32 oz porterhouse.  He then had a few bites of his wife's steak.  We may not do well with the oysters, but we sure know how to enjoy a good steak!

Paul and his waiter with the steak on the tray...

....and below, Paul with nothing but the bone left on the plate!

A few pictures of all of the group at the steakhouse.

This was a pic of dessert that the waiter brought for us with a couple of interesting items on it .  I can't even remember what they were--one was neopalitan ice cream and the other had macadamia nuts in it.  Like I said, interesting.  Most of us there are what you would expect 'country folk' to be like, we love home-cooking and sometimes the fancy, gourmet stuff is a little too out there, but it was sure interesting and fun to try!

And our other entertainment for the night was Zach's coffee that was prepared tableside with flames and all.  Even if they said it tasted like cough syrup, it was fun to watch!

Well, that's it for this post--while it may have been a little late in coming, I did want to report on it because I think this is the best state board meeting we have had since I started a few years ago.  we covered so much and really worked to gether, sharing so many great ideas.  The results of the training with Jill from AFBF have already shown up so much in our county board meetings and on Thursday, the board will continue to work on the goals we set and keep moving forward with more.