California Agricultural Leadership Program

Today we made our journey home. We left Washington D.C. at 6:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time), and with one layover in Atlanta, we arrived home in Sacramento at noon (Pacific Standard Time).

Wow! This was a trip for the record books. We wanted to start off with how extremely proud we are of every CALF Class 52 Fellow. The Fellows repeatedly packed and unpacked as we moved across the country, left their families, pets and loved ones for 11 days to grow and learn new development skills to be effective leaders. The amount of courage and sacrifice it took to start in Sacramento, then fly to Minneapolis, followed by a trip to Washington D.C, was simply remarkable. As we fly back across the country, we want to reflect on the amount of pride and gratitude we have for the CALF. We continue to pinch ourselves and know just how lucky we are to have received this amazing opportunity. We are truly blessed to be part of such an incredible foundation. We are growing so deeply, and we are thrilled for the rest of this journey. It is so refreshing to see our CALF alumni come in and speak at our various events, and this exemplifies one of the of the lifelong bonds Fellows share with CALF!!

So now, time to process and unpack all of the amazing experiences we’ve had on our National Seminar with CALF. We are taking away some very valuable leadership lessons from our journey. One lesson is the importance of finding common ground to build relationships and trust. Ultimately, we have more commonalities than differences, from politics to cultural to social justice issues.  Another key takeaway for us is the importance of starting with these commonalities in finding solutions to our problems, instead of focusing on where we differ.

This is not goodbye for us, and we will be seeing all of our fellows in Pomona April 3^rd-6^th for our next seminar. In the meantime, we will be focusing on a graceful re-entry home, and the intellectual and reflective unpacking of our experiences. We look forward to continuing our blog in October as we journey to Ecuador, Panama and Columbia on our International Seminar. In preparation for this experience, we will continue to focus on developing the leadership tools we have already learned, while growing spiritually, physically and emotionally.

Class 52 would also like to share our deep gratitude to our families, employers, loved ones and pets. We would also like to extend an extra special, heartfelt thank you to the entire California Agricultural Leadership Foundation, the Board of Directors, alumni, staff, core faculty and Director of Education(s). We are forever grateful for your support in our journey.