Farm to Fork is an event that uses locally grown food and used to make the meal for the night. In Hopkins County, we had our second annual Farm to Fork event that consisted of over 150 guest and over 45 volunteers. In 4-H alone, we had one adult male, three adult women, four male youth, eight female youth and one African American female youth to volunteer for this amazing event. 4-H received over $2400 in donations from the event for volunteering.

The other great part about the event though is that the adult and youth get to take life skills away from it. We taught them sanitation policies when handling food, plating food, proper way to serve the dish, and manners when doing so. These are skills that can be used yearly whether it is volunteering for another event, fixing dinner for friends or having supper with family. We taught them basic skills of yes and no ma'am/sir, please and thank you, and to serve the plate without putting their fingers on the tops of the plate. Once we taught them the correct skills, they were able to use them at the event. We were able to critique them if we noticed that they were doing a task improperly. They had about two hours to practice their skills that they learned to serve the guest at Farm to Fork.

After, we had compliments from many guest at the event with how wonderful the servers were. Also, the volunteers said that they loved the experience and could not wait to do it again. They enjoyed helping and liked that they had a job.