American Legion Auxiliary
Department of Illinois
ALA Illini Girls State
Director: Sarah Wyckoff
sarahrichards@hotmail.com
217-273-0158
Dean: Kristie Krigbaum
The 2024 ALA IGS session will be “Teaching real life superpowers to our furture leaders through hands-on experiences--no capes needed!”.
The 83rd session of ALA Illini Girls State will be held on the campus of Eastern Illinois University in Charleston from Sunday June 16th to Saturday June 22nd, 2024. Staff will arrive on Friday June 14th to prepare for the citizens’ arrival. During this week the citizens will learn about the voting process, elections, campaigning, patriotism and so much more.
Auxiliary members, we need your help! In the spirit of full transparency, ALA IGS is at a critical point that has the potential to either make or break this great program. Prior to Covid-19, we averaged between 330-450 participants at IGS. Between our last two in peron sessions, we averaged 150-170 delegates. Not only do we need approximately 300 citizens in order to cover our staff and guest costs. But, our participants are our strongest recruiters, they return to their schools and encourage their classmates to attend, and having lower numbers is causing us to miss these connections to future participants. We must significantly increase our participants this year and need your help to do that.
We encourage all units to send at least one girl to the 83rd session. We have the space, staff, and expertise available to support more participants. Please, start reaching out to your local school counselor/principal/history teacher now. The ALA IGS committee is also exploring direct contact methods with schools, in conjunction with the American Legion youth programs, to get the word directly out to schools about our programs.
We appreciate all of the support from units in continuing this wonderful program. Without your support and contributions, it wouldn’t be possible to put on this amazing program. We will continue to link Units with available funds and interested participants without a sponsor and/or Units that have more participants than they can afford. Please reach out to the committee if you have an interested participant but not funds, we do not want to turn anyone away.
Once you have delegates and are filling out the application, it is very important to fill out the entire application. This includes the middle section with the Unit and District information. If an application comes in without that information, it slows down the process and makes it difficult to assign cities.
The ALA IGS Committee has set the participant fee at $300 for 2024. This is a raise in the fee but with the decrease in delegates and costs, the committee felt like it was needed. The committee wants to provide the best experience for the delegates and maintain our expenses.
The following awards will be offered by ALA IGS Committee this year:
Unit raffle drawing for 1 unit to receive a registartion refund if completed application and check arrive in the Department office by April 1st, 2024.
Unit raffle drawing for 1 unit to recieve registration refund if completed application and check arrive in the Department office by May 1st, 2024.
Winning units will be notified by letter following the raffle drawings
Personal Awards:
• $10 to the first Unit, who has not sponsored an ALA IGS participant in at least 5 years, that submits a completed ALA IGS application and payment to Department Headquarters.
• $10 to the Unit that submits the largest increase over last year in delegates sent to IGS to be verified by Department records
The planning for the 83rd session of ALA Illini Girls State is well underway. We will be attending the National Girls State Conference in September.I am excited to work with Assistant Director Linda Fagan, Dean of Education Kristie Kriegbaum, and Assistant Dean Paula Edwards. Department President Angie, thank you so much for this honor to serve as ALA Illini Girls State Director.
Resources from National
Log into the National website to access these items
- ALA Girls State Press Release Template
- ALA Girls Nation Press Release Template
- ALA Girls State Posters
- ALA Youth Programs Brochure