Promoting leadership and providing services to the community are some of the goals of the ISU Collegiate 4-H members at Iowa State.

Collegiate 4-H is designed to use its members’ leadership skills to get involved in projects in the surrounding areas and to serve as role-models for high school 4-H members, said Heidi Conner, 4-H adviser and graduate student in human development and family studies.

“We provide a lot of leadership in the community,” Conner said.

Sara Baitinger, senior in agricultural business who is in charge of the 4-H programming, said ISU’s Collegiate 4-H club works mainly to provide services around Story County and to work with the high school 4-H members to help provide leadership opportunities.

“The younger kids can see what we have done and know they can continue to be in 4-H at the college level,” Baitinger said.

Collegiate 4-H differs from traditional 4-H because the college students are more involved in services around the community, Baitinger said.

“The younger 4-H members work more on [county and state fair] projects,” she said.

About 30 members are involved in collegiate 4-H at ISU.

“We have a good turnout, but considering how many former 4-H members there are on campus, we are low in numbers to what we could have,” Baitinger said.

Conner said the number of members comes from the variety of the students who can get involved.

“We are fairly popular since we are not limited to any particular college. We have a wide variety of 4-H’ers,” Conner said. “To get involved in 4-H, you basically have to come to a meeting and pay the dues, like you would have to do for any other organization.”

Conner said students in collegiate 4-H can get as involved as they want, and she said there are ample opportunities for members to be on committees or to get involved in the various projects.

The projects 4-H’ers are involved with are not only for the community, Conner said, but also for around campus.

“We usually have a display during Veishea,” Conner said.

She said collegiate 4-H members also worked with the Wellness Center for this year’s Children’s Health Fair.

Besides meeting once a month, collegiate 4-H members also send representatives to regional and national conferences twice a year.

The collegiate 4-H’ers’ current project is a fund raiser to allow students to attend the conferences.

They will be selling Iowa 4-H cookbooks and videos over the holiday season to raise the money, Conner said.