Trying to Shuck 4-H’s Corny Image : Valley Membership Falls Despite Nationwide Growth in Urban Areas

In summers past, television and trouble filled most evenings for children at the San Fernando Gardens housing project in Pacoima.

So when VISTA volunteer Rosa Roman started making phone calls and knocking on doors several months ago, gauging parents’ interest in a pilot 4-H Club within the housing project, the response overwhelmed her. More than 190 children signed up, and 35 attended the club’s first arts and crafts session in temporary Quonset hut quarters last week.

The new club, which its leaders say provides one of the only diversions for the project’s youths, shows the continuing shift in direction for the 4-H in Los Angeles County.

Created in 1900 to enable rural children to develop their “heads, hearts, hands and health” through community and individual projects, 4-H found itself in a precipitous membership dive nationally during most of the 1980s, said Andrew Buhler, spokesman for the National 4-H Council based in Chevy Chase, Md.

That decline was mirrored in the increasingly urbanized San Fernando Valley, where in 1984 14 clubs had 400 members. Before the new club opened this month in the San Fernando Gardens, 4-H had only 90 children in its six remaining Valley clubs, some with fewer than a dozen members.

During the past three years, the organization locally and nationally has sought new members not just for rural clubs, but also in housing projects and inner city school districts.

The San Fernando Gardens 4-H Club is one of nine programs operating in Los Angeles housing projects. Other cites include Imperial Courts , Mar Vista, Dana Strand and Ramona Gardens.

To attract the city kids, activities such as astronomy, woodworking, gardening, cooking and working with computers, augmented more traditional projects such as raising livestock and growing vegetables.

Largely because of new clubs in low-income neighborhoods, 4-H membership in Los Angeles County is up, with 2,311 members during the 1988-89 fiscal year, compared to 1,593 in 1984-85. Riverside and San Bernardino counties, which saw declines in club membership from the mid-to-late 1980s, now are seeing a turnaround as well, officials said.

Linda Araujo-Wilson, 4-H youth development adviser in Riverside County, said the organization is gradually adapting to new demographic challenges: holding club meetings during lunch for children bused to school, conducting 4-H leadership seminars in English and Spanish, and working with the NAACP and the Urban League to bring clubs to low-income neighborhoods.

Much of the subject matter of 4-H has changed as well, said Buhler of the National 4-H Council, with clubs around the country conducting workshops on teen suicide, substance abuse and teen pregnancy. Some of the programs are in small, rural towns, but most are not, he said. In 1988, only 13.3% of the organization’s national membership lived on farms.

The newest 4-H Club in the San Fernando Valley has neither freckle-faced farm kids nor award-winning heifers, but its members seem as excited as any 9-year-old planting his first beans in anticipation of the county fair.

At the club’s meeting last Thursday, Sandy Sanchez, 12, already had something to be proud of: a neatly stitched flower petal taking shape on an embroidery hoop.

She also had been elected by the children gathered in the housing project’s stuffy Head Start building to lead the arts and crafts group, which will meet daily from 5 to 7 p.m.

“The teacher said we need a leader that wants to be a leader,” she said proudly. “I got to be it.”

Sandy said she already likes 4-H, especially because it meets in the late afternoon. During the day, she said, she cares for her 2-month-old brother, and “I usually don’t come outside.”

Deirdre Thompson, the county cooperative extension 4-H agent who oversees the new club, admitted there have been failures at some other housing projects because parent volunteers sometimes cannot be recruited, or because grants to pay for supplies and leaders’ stipends were lost.

But she said she is optimistic about the club in the San Fernando Gardens, because the housing project virtually has no other diversions for children, and parents fear letting them venture into the nearby neighborhoods for outside recreation programs.

“We already have four adult volunteers and we’ve got a captive audience, so to speak,” Thompson said.

The arts and crafts project, the first undertaken by the new club, is only the beginning, said VISTA volunteer Roman, who lives in San Fernando Gardens. Under a cooperative agreement, VISTA volunteers help organize new clubs and provide early guidance.

Projects soon will be established in camping, foods and nutrition and football, she said.

“The people here, they are real happy,” Roman said. “They want the kids to learn something.”

4-H’s new direction hasn’t met with enthusiasm among longtime 4-H Club leaders, some of whom fear the new clubs in housing projects and inner-city schools will divert resources and staff attention away from agriculturally oriented clubs that also need help to survive.

John Pusey, a Los Angeles County 4-H adviser, acknowledged a shift in resources has occurred. “We are a traditionally suburban and rural organization that is attempting to reach out to environments and economic groups that hadn’t been reached before,” he said.

“Nationally, regionally and locally, everyone is working to decide, what is the best direction for 4-H to take? Where will 4-H be most effective?” Pusey said.