By KEVIN WALKER
Michigan Correspondent

DEARBORN, Mich. — Ford Trucks has been a partner with the National FFA for a long time, and it’s going to be there again as the student group kicks off its 83rd national convention in Indianapolis later this month.

The relationship goes back almost as long as the Ford Motor Co. has been making pickup trucks, according to Doug Scott, group product marketing and planning manager for Ford Trucks and a member of the FFA sponsors board. That would be 60 years.
“If not the longest-running, we’re one of the longest-tenured sponsors of the FFA,” Scott said. “Over time we’ve evolved our relationship with the FFA.”

Ford Trucks has evolved its truck lines, too. It started out making the F-1, then the F-100 and later, the F-150.

It also split its truck line at one point, making the F-150 and the Super Duty as two separate lines.

It’s in the 12th generation of its pickup trucks.
The FFA used to be pretty much a rural organization, according to Scott; as such, a partnership between the company and the FFA always seemed a natural fit.

After all, many former FFA members might be expected to buy a pickup truck at some point in their lives.

Now the FFA is an organization that reaches into the city as well as the country, and it’s grown as a result. The National FFA now has half a million members and is often viewed as a great way to help young people learn leadership skills. The scholarships Ford Trucks sponsors have grown recently, too.

“We’ve grown it from about 200 scholarships to about 480 now,” Scott said.

The scholarship program Ford sponsors is a $1,000 award that goes to an eligible high school senior who is an FFA member (many each year). Half of the scholarship funds comes from 300 Ford dealers themselves, as opposed to the corporation. Scott pointed to this as evidence that Ford’s involvement with the FFA is more than superficial public relations.

“Our Texas dealers actually have a sponsorship of the state FFA,” Scott said. “They built them a building. They are overrepresented in our national sponsors. Our Kansas dealers are also involved in the state chapter. It’s a great means of getting involved in the community.”

In the 11 years the program has existed, Ford and local Ford dealers have helped more than 5,058 FFA members go to college. In 2009 alone the program awarded 462 scholarships to FFA members beginning their college education.

In conjunction with this program, Ford Trucks also provides a two-year lease on an F-Series Super Duty truck to the FFA chapter with the highest scores among their scholarship applicants.

The Ford Motor Co. has also been the sole sponsor of the FFA’s Environmental Science and Natural Resources Management National Proficiency Award for the past several years. This program starts out at the local FFA chapters; the best members in this area go to the national convention and one member is selected to win a national award.

“The proficiency award system offers perhaps the best targeted visibility (for Ford) within the FFA system,” Scott said.

He boasted that 50,000-70,000 students will attend the national FFA convention later this month. “We’re going to have a display at the national convention,” Scott said. “We’ll be there in Indianapolis.”