why join the International Federation of Home Economics with Dr. Gwendolyn Hustevdt and Dr. Janine Duncan

<p>• International Federation For Home Economics was founded more than 100 years ago in 1908, it was founded to basically help have a conversation about home economics as a discipline on a global stage across global hat forms. And so I got involved because it's just a chance to meet people who share many of our same perspectives, but maybe not all of our exact same concerns or issues, so depending on what country they're in, they're structured a little differently, they have support coming from different places, or they have a different position or status within their society, it can be easy sometimes for us to get a little bit defensive, we sometimes feel like we have to always explain, yes, we still exist, or this is what we do, or...It's a lot of things, but we're all together, and so it's really great to meet people who receive different kinds of support or have a different perspective on what should be included or how things should work. So just to put it simply, the International Federation For Home Economics is the only international organization that's designed to promote home economics across the world, that's what the organization is in a nutshell.(4:13)</p><p>• I was a second-year middle school teacher when I went to my first congress. It was something that was part of the culture of where I went to school at the University of Illinois, and we had a group of people who were going. And I thought, Well, you know, I had to make choices, and I attended that year, and it was a remarkable experience.  I remember having someone ask me when I was there, "why would a middle school teacher come to the Internation Federation of Home Economics Congress? I was stunned by the question 'cause I thought, Well, why wouldn't we... And really what's to be gained, there's everything that we do as teachers of home economics, family consumer sciences, now that we refer to it, is about trying to connect people, and that if we're really trying to connect people and build Understandings cross-culturally, then the best way to d