North Carolina 4-H is proud to support the more than 123,622 active duty, reserve and guard troops who call our state home.
Particularly during this time of global deployment, these soldiers need to know that their families here at home are surrounded by supportive citizens, offering a cadre of services and resources to help ease the stress of pre-deployment, deployment and post-deployment. More than 103,000 military youth from the ages of 0 to 18 (17,220 Guard and Reserve and 85,898 Active Duty) call North Carolina home.
A training program entitled “Hidden Heroes” will be held from 10 a.m. until 4 p.m. Friday, May 6, at the Rowan County Cooperative Extension Office. Hidden Heroes is a program to help teach our community how we can help the military families in our community.
The intent of Hidden Heroes training is to increase ordinary citizens’ understanding of the unique issues facing military youth and assist them in creating state and local Operation Military Kids support networks.
School personnel, youth-serving agency staff, and civic groups may find Hidden Heroes training especially beneficial.
As part of the training, you will receive a resource materials training toolkit designed to educate youth workers, educators, counselors and other community service agencies on military culture, deployment cycle, fostering resilience in kids, influence of the media and building community capacity.
How does this affect your community? Here are local numbers of youth left behind after a parent was deployed:
• Davidson County: 284.
• Forsyth County: 786.
• Iredell County: 390.
• Rowan County: 335.
• Surry County: 147.
• Yadkin County: 59.
The cost for the workshop is $10, which covers the cost of all program materials and lunch.
To register, contact Sara Drake, 4-H Extension Agent, at sara_drake@ncsu.edu or 704-216-8970 to register by April 27.
The mailing address is:
NC Cooperative Extension, Rowan County Center
2727-A Old Concord Road
Salisbury, NC 28146
The website is http://rowanextension.com