INDIANAPOLIS — Hayley Ann Hines sat in Lucas Oil Stadium with her heart racing. She was a few moments away from thousands of National FFA Organization members hearing her name called for an Agricultural Proficiency Award last week during the second session of the 97th convention.
All of a sudden a spotlight was shone in her direction, her name was announced, and she dashed into place.
“It was amazing, but nerve-wracking,” she said after the ceremony.
Agricultural Proficiency Awards honor FFA members who, through Supervised Agricultural Experiences, have developed specialized skills that they can apply toward their future careers. She was one of seven winners announced on Thursday, recognized in the Service-Learning – Entrepreneurship/Placement category.
Hines was honored because, during her freshman year in high school and as a member of the Paola FFA Chapter in Kansas, she started a food pantry at her school to help those in need.
Now a student at Kansas State University, Hines talked about what inspired her to begin this initiative back in November 2020. The country was still grappling with the COVID-19 pandemic, but Paola High School had returned to in-person classes. Students who may be struggling with food security under even normal circumstances were especially vulnerable then.
“I noticed that students sitting next to me in class were going home hungry or having to leave early to go work to support their families,” she explained. “And that just didn’t sit right with me.”
Her program, called Panthers Helping Panthers, was named after her school’s mascot. The Paolo community has almost 6,000 people in it, and Hines said that the nature of the area and its population can sometimes make it difficult to recognize the need in some corners.
She said she had to take the initiative to open her eyes to what was around her. One feature that has helped the program thrive is that it is built around anonymity. School counselors are involved in managing a Google form that is sent to students every week and abides by state laws regarding privacy. Each recipient of a food pantry order is assigned a number, but Hines doesn’t know the name associated with that number.
“It seems like it’s hard to have a secret in high school. But I found that more students were utilizing it [when it’s anonymous] because it can be hard to ask for help, especially when it’s something that is can seem like it’s diminishing your ego, even though it’s really not,” Hines said.
Hines worked hard to raise money and solicit goods for the program. Organizations such as Rotary Club and the Philanthropic Education Organization (P.E.O.) helped with financial donations totaling about $14,000 over the years. She also hosted food drives (and nurtured some fun and healthy competition between classrooms) for nonperishable canned goods, often pulling in about 2,000 a year.
One of her ag advisors even helped her apply for a grant from Farm Credit, which went toward raising chickens and pigs that would be used as a source of protein for the pantry. They are raised at the school’s animal science lab in a partnership with the animal science class, which gets the opportunity to feed, vaccinate, and care for the livestock prior to harvesting.
Hines said the community has been “super supportive, and the newspaper wrote lots of different articles about me. PEO was definitely my biggest supporter.” The group even backed Hines as she became a P.E.O. International STAR Scholar.
Hines spent her senior year in high school training her replacement so that the program could continue while she was at college, where she’s studying nutrition, health, and nursing.
“Going into the healthcare field definitely brings along a lot of the skills that I learned in the food pantry, and so I think that’s going to be a way that I can take my love for helping individuals and pass it into my later life,” she said. “K-State actually has a food pantry on campus, and so after I serve my state officer year, I plan to help volunteer there.”
Hines has spent her life looking to help others — like being named “Saint of the Week” at her elementary school and donating hair to Locks of Love — and there’s every reason to believe she will continue down that road far into the future.
“It’s not about yourself. It’s about the people that you help,” she said. “While I didn’t get to see their reactions face to face, I had adults telling me how much I was impacting others. You can always make an impact on someone’s life, so it’s just a matter of finding a way to do that.”
Ryan Tipps is the founder and managing editor of AGDAILY. He has covered farming since 2011, and his writing has been honored by state- and national-level agricultural organizations.
