Championing the voices of St Albans Senior YFC members, and indeed those in Hertfordshire, is a personal mission for Club Chair and County Vice Chair Will Grovestock.
As the winner of the Sydney Fawcett trophy at this year’s Annual Meeting of Clubs (AMC), for sharing the views of Hertfordshire members, you could say the 22 year old has achieved his ambition! After being involved in YFC for the past 13 years, Will has grown in confidence since leading the Senior club – growing it from just five members to an impressive 29.
I had moved up from St Albans Junior YFC with my friend Max Hooper and after a year of being in the club, a few of the older members had started to leave. At the Rally, they told us they were leaving the club for us to manage, so I kind of fell into the role. It was a tough few years at the beginning, with a lot of learning curves!
At St Albans we have a Junior and a Senior club. I am Chair of St Albans Seniors, which is for members aged between 16 and 28. We invite some of the older junior members from St Albans Juniors to attend some of our meetings before they move up so they can find out more about the senior club. Having two clubs for different age groups helps keep older members involved and allows us to put more senior-focused meetings on.
St Albans Seniors plan their programme in two sections – one from September through to December, and then the second half goes through to around mid to the end of June.
The committee works together to review what went well and we always ask members what they want to do, see or learn more about. We try and include a mix of farming-based meetings but also throw in a lot of fun meetings, such as Zorbing or our Chicken Run that we did this year!
Our main recruitment strategy is through our members by always encouraging them to bring their friends with them to a meeting. In the last few years, we have also started to have a bigger presence at our county show, as well as promoting the club on social media.
Club duties are always made easier when shared between a group of you – something I personally struggle with doing. However, our club Vice Chair Zoe Yalden has done a massive amount of work on sharing the workload between our committee, making sure everyone knows what they need to do and when they need to do it by.
Public Speaking. As much as public speaking never gets easier and is always scary, YFC has given me the confidence to speak out. This can be as simple as speaking to members in my club or addressing crowds at the county show. The most scariest speech to date was the one I made at the recent AMC in Wales!
Time is my biggest challenge. There is only so much time in one day, one week, one month, and so on! And there is only so much time you have to spare.
I found it hard putting an interesting meeting on each week that made members want to be there. After two years of struggling with this, I decided with my Vice Chair at the time that we would do a meeting every other week instead.
As a club for older members this worked really well, and meant we could host fewer but more impactful meetings. I believe this is part of the reason why our club has grown so much from the five members it had when I took on the role as Chair to the 29 it has now.
As a smaller county with not much representation at a national level, we can often get overlooked. Despite this, our members' views and opinions still need to be voiced at a County, Area and national level.
Before Ellie Bullard and I became County Chair and Vice Chair respectively, Hertfordshire was considered absent from the national scene. This is something we have been determined to change by turning up to Area events even if we weren’t competing and making sure we always had one representative at national meetings. This has meant we could bring information back to the County, gather our members’ opinions and ensure they’re heard higher up the Federation.
Speaking at the recent AMC was one way of ensuring our members’ opinions were shared. I was proud to be awarded the Sydney Fawcett trophy for giving the best contribution to the meeting – another win for Hertfordshire!
Ask questions. No question is ever a stupid question and everyone in this awesome organisation will help you. Often the question you have is one they’ve asked someone else before you, as they have been in the same shoes as you at one point.
If you would like to be featured in our club officer check in, email media@nfyfc.org.uk. Find more information and guidance for club officers in the YFC Handbook.
