Students from across the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences, two North Carolina high schools and Grenada’s T.A. Marryshow Community College collaborated to learn more about leadership skills and career advancement in an eight-week digital and in-person program.

The program, the FCS Professional Development Leadership Series, is a USDA-funded collaboration with the college’s Department of Family and Consumer Sciences, Davidson-Davie Community College, Lexington Senior High School, and T.A. Marryshow, concluding in a three-day workshop held at the Marryshow campus this spring.

“It’s been a very warm, welcoming, and productive collaboration,” said Meeshay Williams-Wheeler, project director and associate professor in the Department of Family and Consumer Sciences. “The students, as well as the teachers, across all institutions were very receptive to collaborating and learning and being immersed within the culture.”

According to Wheeler, the project began in 2023, when she received an 1890s USDA Capacity Building Grant to develop a leadership program in collaboration with Davidson-Davie and Lexington Senior High School.

Colleagues at each institution worked to develop a program teaching leadership skills in child development, nutrition, consumer services and fashion merchandising and design – all Family and Consumer Sciences areas, said Wheeler.

At the same time, Faulkner, who had built a working collaboration with the vice principal of T.A. Marryshow College in Grenada through the USDA’s Multicultural Scholars Program, found out about the Walmart Excel Fellows program, a one-year fellowship funded by Walmart to help support student success.

 “As our USDA capacity grant was still underway as well as our collaboration with those three other institutions, I thought, ‘Why reinvent the wheel? Let’s perhaps develop another module to this,’ ” said Wheeler.

According to Wheeler, the proposal for the fellows program was built on the current relationship with T.A. Marryshow and the merit of the ongoing USDA grant, allowing for a sixth module, “professionalism and dress”, to the project, tying in both Davidson-Davie and Lexington Senior High as partner institutions.

“We recruited five nutrition major students from T.A. Marryshow to join what we call the  Leadership Scholars Program. It includes students from Davidson-Davie and Lexington Senior High School, and 10 of our own scholars from North Carolina A&T, so five from each of these other institutions, and they would all work from the same six modules.”

All of the students completed the curriculum on Blackboard, and then spent three days in May at T.A. Marryshow. The scholars presented posters reflecting on their learned experiences from each of the modules.

“The reception by the students overall was highly positive,” said Wheeler. “We had students who were interested in learning more about A&T through some of our FCS material, and in the oral and poster presentations, they reflected on how these modules impacted how they saw themselves as a leader entering the professional workforce.”

Wheeler said she would like to see other programs outside of CAES, if not other 1890 land-grant universities, to build on the current six-curriculum module and continue the partnership with T.A. Marryshow.

“The students expressed a lot of interest in subjects in and out of the College of Agriculture, such as journalism, architecture or studying business and so on,” said Wheeler. “It was a great addition in sharing what we know and how we could help them in these other areas, and down the road, it would be great to partner in to a 2+2 agreement and bring some of them to us as we had gone to them.”