Santa Cruz County 4-H Member's Tech Lessons Connect Families, Community

When recent Rio Rico High School graduate Ivan Becerril started in Santa Cruz County 4-H four years ago, he was a shy, quiet boy.

Now as a young man, Becerril, 18, credits the University of Arizona Cooperative Extension youth development program with pulling him out of his shell and into his Southern Arizona community.

“It has really helped me grow as a person and to be able to have an impact with the people in my community. 4-H gave me all these new experiences, all these new opportunities, and I was able to explore, to talk to new people,” said Becerril, who is currently serving as a 4-H Tech Changemakers National Ambassador.

Tech Changemakers, a national 4-H program, trains teens to narrow the “digital divide” – the gap between people who have access to and knowledge of the digital world and those who don’t. In his classes, Becerril helped more than 3,000 people learn how to use technology, said Norma Elisa Ruiz, Santa Cruz County 4-H Youth Development assistant in Extension.

In the first year, Ivan met his goal to reach 1,500 people, and he kept going. This year, he has bumped that up to 2,500. He tailored all of the classes to meet the needs of the community, including offering classes in Spanish, Ruiz said.

“The younger population? They want to know how to work with Excel, Google, how to navigate the Internet to find a job. But we were also serving middle-age people and the elderly. The middle-aged, I found, want to know about the phone. How to not get viruses. How to manage storage space. How to do Facetime,” she said.

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The greatest impact came in the senior population.

“We went into the (senior) centers, and there were residents there who were very lonely. We started when we were coming out of the pandemic, and there were still a lot of people not coming out. They were very lonely, and Ivan showed them how to do Facetime calls with their family members,” Ruiz said.

The transformation was life-changing.

“They now have the skills to use their phones, use their laptops, their computers to communicate with people and basically open themselves up to a whole new world, being able to communicate with the ones they love,” Becerril said.

Becerril joined 4-H between 8^th grade and his freshman year of high school. Since then he has been a STEM Ambassador, a Space Ambassador, and a Tech Changemaker Ambassador. Last summer he went to NASA’s John F. Kennedy Space Center with the Space Mission Command Project, coordinated by the Arizona 4-H STEM YOUniversity, which fosters youth involvement in science via hands-on learning and exposure to real-world science.

As a Tech Changemakers Ambassador, Ivan translated the entire Tech Changemakers curriculum into Spanish, adding new lessons to build the nine-lesson workshop to 21. Topics include how to set up and join Zoom meetings, navigate the Internet and detect fraudulent websites, use smart phones, and build resumes. Becerril’s work left its mark – on him and the people he helped.

“It’s something I can’t really put into words. A lot of people were afraid to use technology, to even use their phones. They were afraid of the unknown. But with the classes and everything that they learned, they were able to take away their fear and conquer the unknown,” he said.

Becerril plans to go to University of Arizona this fall to study civil engineering and business administration, leaving Santa Cruz County 4-H wondering how they will replace him.

“I don’t know! We’ve been talking about that. It’s going to be very hard to replace Ivan,” Ruiz said.