It’s difficult to give advice if you don’t know what to say. The Parkland chapter of the Canadian Association of Farm Advisors (CAFA) has been hosting monthly learning events to learn and gain insight into different topics, with the fourth Wednesday of every month featuring a different pair of topics by presenters.
The most recent CAFA Learning Event took place on Feb. 26, featuring two presentations. One was by Gerry Friesen, speaking about stressful encounters. The other was by Abe Toews with Beyond Wealth, talking about gift giving with the use of a foundation.
Denise Filipchuck with CAFA said that the goal of the event is to help the advisors help farmers, and that guides their selection of speakers and topics. Their goal is not to find people in farm sales, but to address topics that farmers will be asking about and dealing with on a regular basis.
Friesen, for example, talked about stressful encounters. He said that the CAFA members are frontline staff, and are going to deal with a lot of people who are in the middle of a stressful situation.
“Our clients are feeling a ton of stress these days. It’s been difficult in agriculture and so very often our clients are feeling stressors, and often the first people who go out to see them are ones that are going to feel the brunt of that frustration and all of the stuff they’re going through.”
Part of the presentation involved what to do when in the middle of those stressful encounters, as well as what they can do to manage the stress later.
“I have people come to me and tell me how important that is... Often frontline workers don’t realize what exactly they’re going through. It’s no different from our clients. I mean, our clients get hit by the storm as I say and so they feel lost, they feel confused, just like was when I was farming. Then we get advisors going out to meet with them, and they get hit by the storm. So it’s an ongoing issue.”
