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‘Annie’s Project’ founder retiring; Indiana classes form

By MICHELE F. MIHALJEVICH
Indiana Correspondent

FORT WAYNE, Ind. — For Ruth Hambleton, “Annie’s Project” is more than a seminar to teach farm women about finances, management and marketing. For her, it’s also personal.

Hambleton, an extension educator in the southern area for the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, founded Annie’s Project in honor of her mother, who was a farm wife in Illinois. The first Annie’s Project seminar was at the Kaskaskia Community College in Illinois in February 2003.

“There were 10 women in that first class,” Hambleton said. “And we’ve never looked back.”

She is retiring at the end of January and starting next Monday, Annie’s Project will become a not-for-profit enterprise, she said. “I’ll be focusing totally on education for farm women,” she added.
“We’ve been able to find out what was effective and what wasn’t.”
Eighteen Purdue University extension offices in Indiana will host the six-session workshop Feb. 19 and 26 and March 5, 11, 19 and 26. Various sites offer afternoon and evening sessions and the cost is $75 a person for the six-week course.

The goal of the workshop is to show farm women how to become more valuable partners in the farm operation, Hambleton said. “This will teach them how to better be a part of the decision-making process,” she said. “They can think and can be asked questions, and become involved.

“We also want them to be able to run the farm operation if they have to. Before something happens, we want them to feel as if they could do it.”

The Purdue seminar, funded by a grant from the North Central Risk Management Education Center, will feature a combination of live speakers and video conferencing, said Kelly Easterday, an extension educator in Kosciusko County.

“An interactive video conference will be a part of all but the first session,” she said. “Also, each site will bring in local speakers to try to meet the needs and questions the local audience might have.”
Annie’s Project is timely because of the state of the economy.
“Every decision you make on your farm is going to have a financial impact,” she explained. “The seminars will look at making family financial decisions, estate planning, farm finances. This will help them make good decisions in 2009.”

Hambleton decided to name the workshop after her mother as she was applying for the program’s first grant.

“As I was working on the grant application, I sat back and closed my eyes, and thought about my mother and what she would have needed to be even more successful,” she said. “Out came this program; I started with that vision.”

Hambleton’s mother, Annie Kohlhagen Fleck, died in 1997. Her brother, Russell, farmed in the Rensselaer, Ind., area.

“My mother was a very typical farm woman, she was just a common woman,” Hambleton said. “She lived with her mother-in-law as part of a three-generation family living under one roof. But when other farm women hear her story, they tell me how easily they can relate to it, and to her.”

Women decide to attend the workshop for a variety of reasons, including to learn about wills and estate planning, to meet other farm women and to help create a marketing plan, Easterday said.
“There really seems to be something for everybody,” she said. “We’ve had participants in their eighties, who say they still learn something in class.”

Research has found that women do like to learn in groups, Hambleton said. “There’s a comfort in it, and it’s a safe harbor,” she said. “They can mentor each other and friendships have developed. That’s pretty much how my mother would have wanted to learn.”

Hambleton is retiring at the end of January and starting next Monday, Annie’s Project will become a not-for-profit enterprise, she said.

“I’ll be focusing totally on education for farm women,” she said. “We’ve been able to find out what was effective and what wasn’t.”
For more information and to register before the Feb. 5 deadline, contact Easterday at 574-372-2340 or visit
www.agriculture.purdue.edu/wia and click on the Annie’s Project link on the left, then click on “upcoming events” under “contact” and scroll down to “Annie’s Project IP video series.”

1/29/2009