HARLINGEN — A grant awarded to a local 4-H club will fund leadership training opportunities here at home.
“We’re very excited because everything in 4-H in Texas is a long way away from Cameron County,” said Cynthia Gray, club manager for Highland Hustlers, the oldest 4-H in Cameron County.
Sam and Missy Morrow donated $5,000 to the organization Monday at its monthly meeting. They have been life-long members of the Highland Hustlers, so when they were awarded the grant from Bayer Crop Science it was only “fitting” the money should go their favorite program, said Missy Morrow.
“We are third generation members of the Highland Hustlers 4-H Club and that is actually how my husband and I met many many years ago,” she said. “He was 9 and I was 13. We were in the same 4-H Club, Highland Hustlers 4-H. That was where we met, and so whenever we married, we decided, we had one child our daughter, and we decided that 4-H club would be the one that she would join, and she did.”
Now their grandchildren are in Highland Hustlers in what seems to have become a family tradition.
“It holds a really special part in our hearts,” she said.
The Texas 4-H Conference Center is in Brownwood, Gray said, a day’s drive from Cameron County. The grant money will make possible those leadership opportunities closer to home.
“We have the opportunity to do a leadership camp or a series of them,” she said. “We have not worked out the details. We literally have been waiting for this for months. We just found out. This is a huge opportunity for our kids so we’re very excited for the opportunity to receive the money, to put on a program that our children likely haven’t participated in before.”
Gray spoke of a broad array of opportunities open to youth in 4-H.
“Whatever your interest is, we can probably meet it in 4-H,” Gray said. “We have kids that have projects in photography, horticulture, leadership. There are a lot of STEM projects in robotics. Community service, civic education, there certainly are livestock projects. There are also plant and soil science programs. There’s a veterinary science program. If you can think it there’s a project for it.”
