Hello everyone! My name is Angie Sullivan, and I am the Apprenticeship Director for DGA. What does that mean? That means I have been tasked with ensuring the day-to-day operations of the Apprenticeship program are running smoothly and I have to say, what a great job it is!
This little corner of the newsletter will be a place for me to give updates on the Apprenticeship, share exciting news about our Apprentices and Mentors and highlight the success stories coming out of our DGA program.
We have over 200 Mentors registered with our program. Thirty-one of those Mentors currently have an Apprentice on their farm, and some have two! These Mentors are the backbone of our program, and we couldn’t do what we do without them.
There have also been 57 Apprentices graduate to Journeyworker, many of them still on their original Mentor farm in various capacities. Not only are these Mentors willing to bring people onto their farms and teach them how to run a managed grazing dairy, but they often end up gaining a friend and family member. Other times they end up finding a successor for their farm after they retire. These situations are a win-win, in our book.
We have many resources available for our Mentors on our internal Mentor Resource page of the DGA dashboard. https://www.dga-national.org/program/resources/master-resources We would love to offer more resources, classes, webinars, or face-to-face opportunities for our Mentors too. If you are a DGA Mentor, please feel free to call, email or text me anytime to give me your feedback and ideas for how we can help you in your role as a DGA Mentor!
We cannot continually improve this great program unless we hear from our participants about the things we are doing right and the things we could be doing better.
I have enjoyed meeting some of you this spring and hope to meet many more this summer as I visit many of our states and attend DGA events.
Thank you for your time and dedication to this program! We appreciate you more than you know.
