Marie Logan of Wheatcrest Farms, which is located in the Lomond area, recently received her Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal. “It’s just nice to be recognized for volunteer work,” Logan said.
Logan says that she received this Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal for her volunteer efforts with 4-H Alberta after previously receiving the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal from the Canadian 4-H Council in 2012. Logan says she has been involved in 4-H for 49 years.
Logan said back when she served on the Canadian 4-H Council’s committee, she helped plan things to keep the 4-H movement growing and she was also president of the Canadian 4-H Council. While in those positions, Logan says, she made really good connections with the United States and who had a massive 4-H program, and they pretty well shared all things that they had with the Canadian 4-H organization.
“With any youth organization, you’ve gotta stay relevant all the time and be offering programs that appeal to the youth and keep your numbers up and keep enough people interested in it,” Logan said. “And I played a hand in that, but it just wasn’t me. There was lots of people working together to accomplish these things. There was the provincial 4-H group and then there was all the regional groups and then there were all the district groups and then it gets down to clubs. So it was everybody working together.”
Logan says that she’s also currently the chairman of the Horizon School Division board of trustees, a board she has been involved with since 1994 and she also serves as Vice Chair of the Chinook Arch Library System. She, Logan says, was actually a founding member of the Chinook Arch Library System.
“If you wanna make a difference in your community, pick something that you have a passion for, and do it,” Logan said. “It’s amazing the differences you can make.”
This recent Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, Logan says, is not the first one she has received for her hard work: she has also received the Alberta Centennial Medal for volunteerism, and she also received the Rosemary Davis Award after being nominated by a federal bureaucrat for work she did with the Canadian 4-H Council.
“It was a farm credit award for leadership, and it was a trip to Boston to Simon’s Women Conference that had 3000 women at it,” Logan said. “And I had my own personal attendant.”
Logan says she has also received other accolades including a long service award for being on her local school board, the Canadian 4-Council, along with honourary lifetime memberships with the Canadian 4-H Councils and the Alberta Library Trustees Association in recognition of all of her service. In addition to that, Logan says, she was inducted into the 4-H Hall of Fame in the year 2000, given a Premier’s Award of Excellence, and named the Canadian 4-H Volunteer of the Year Award.
“My objective in life has been to make a difference for women and children in the area,” Logan said. “And I’ve always said, if you want families to live in rural Alberta, you gotta see that there’s some services there.”
At one point, Logan says she was even involved in the Alberta group of a federal program called the Community Access Program.
“It was a program that the federal government did, and it got computers into all the local libraries,” Logan said. “So we saw the libraries and saw that they got computers. And then I was appointed to the Rural Alberta Development Fund, and we were given a blank sheet of paper. They picked 13 of us across the province and told us to figure out how to give out $100 million to make a difference in rural Alberta. And we did that. We managed to invest good enough that we actually gave out the full amount to projects in rural Alberta and there was still money left over.”
Currently, Logan serves as the key leader on the District 4-H Council in Vulcan, a representative on the regional 4-H Council in Lethbridge, and Vice-Chair of all the libraries in the Chinook Arch Library System. On top of all of her volunteer work, Logan also works with her family at their farm, Wheatcrest Farms, which has been operating since the turn of the century and has had six generations live on it.
“When you live in a tiny little place like Lomond, you soon realize that if you’re going to do things, there’s a whole bunch of different things you can help with,” Logan said. “They always need volunteers… that’s how things get done.”
By Heather Cameron, Local Journalism Initiative Reporter
Original Published on May 31, 2023
No replies yet
Loading new replies...
Join the full discussion at the TheRegional / Chat →