Homemaker aims to help rebuild clubs

Extension Homemakers Clubs were started in the 1920s and were immensely popular for decades — so much so that Carroll County alone had more than 30 clubs in the 1970s.

But membership has declined over the decades, while the average age of club members has gone up significantly.

Berryville’s Katy Generaux hopes to reverse both trends.

In January, Generaux started a new Extension Homemakers Club in Berryville. The club is called “Next Generation.”

“Our primary focus is to try to attract younger women,” Generaux said, noting that Extension Homemakers Clubs are open to both men and women. When the clubs began in the 1920s, she said, their goal was to educate homemakers on useful skills.

“It’s always been open to women of all ages,” she said. “It started as an educational program to help with teaching homemakers food preservation, how to clean, things of that nature. And then it just expanded over time.”

Generaux said that as more women returned to the workforce beginning in the 1970s, EHC membership began to wane.

“There just weren’t that many stay-at-home homemakers,” she said. “I feel like since COVID, we have so many more people who are back at home more regularly or at least have a flexible schedule. So they would be able to be involved in EHC again.”

There are currently four active clubs in Carroll County, Generaux said. All four meet in Berryville, include the Next Generation club that meets on Thursday nights.

“We also do Tri-County events that involve Newton County, Carroll County and Madison County,” Generaux said. “They do that multiple times throughout the year.”

The local clubs are administered through the Arkansas Cooperative Extension Service’s Carroll County office and agent Torrie Smith. The local office also administers the Master Gardener and 4-H clubs.

“What I’m finding is there’s a lot of overlap in what each of those do, because they’re all educational minded,” Generaux said. “It’s just a lot of the clubs just never get together with the other groups. So our club is trying to bridge that gap.”

The Next Generation club had Master Gardeners visit as speakers during the spring. In turn, the Next Generation members plan to hold crafts classes for 4-H members who want to enter items in the county fair.

Generaux said that before she became involved with EHC she had “literally never heard of it.”

“And as I started talking to other people, most people my age had never heard of it,” she said. “And then my grandmother was like: ‘Oh, yeah, all my friends were in it.’ ” Now, Generaux hopes to create more interest in EHC.

“It’s my vision to see a Next Generation Extension Homemakers in every county,” she said. “In the process of doing that, it teaches the leadership skills of the younger generation because each club is run through Robert’s Rules of Order. So you learn how to do debates and how to do formal business meetings. You learn how to do the voting process. It’s all about leadership. Everyone in the club over time is given a different role to play. We have a secretary and treasurer, all those things. These are the women from the 1970s and 1960s that have been trained in all that. And if you look at it, most of those women are the ones that actually started the nonprofit organizations that are some of the biggest ones today. They were actually trained early on through EHC and when they had a big idea, it was easier for them to execute it.”