The National FFA Organization recently surpassed a record-breaking milestone; surpassing one million members. Scott Stump, CEO of National FFA says the organization currently has 1, 027,273 members in chapters across the United States, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands. He credits the organization’s growth to the work teachers do in the classroom each day to invest in student growth.
“Over the past 10 years, we’ve added 2,000 new chapters, which means that 2000 school districts and high schools or middle schools have said, yes, we want this for our students. And you know that growth and number of chapters has led to this huge increase in membership,” says Stump. “The second thing is that we’ve had several states recently that instead of working from the premise that each student in an agriculture education classroom needs to pay their individual dues in 2010, implemented a chapter fee system where a chapter can just pay a flat fee, and then all students that are enrolled in agriculture education are automatically FFA members and invited into that participation.”
Stump adds that 60 percent of members come from small communities and the other 40 percent are from a suburban/ urban area. Utah, Florida, and Alaska saw the largest percentage of membership growth compared to last year.
