Region Profile: The Southeast Region

Submitted by: David Klinkicht, Southeast Region President

The Southeast Region consists of 14 chapters located in the states of Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina. Georgia has 3336 members in 4 chapters; North Carolina has 2196 members in 6 chapters; and South Carolina has 1737 members in 4 chapters. Each chapter is unique and supports the AFA mission of Educating, Advocating, and Supporting our great Air Force. Whether it is our smallest chapter of 75 members from Kitty Hawk, NC, or the Region’s two largest chapters each with 1,000 plus members from Georgia (Dobbins Chapter in Atlanta and Carl Vinson Memorial Chapter in Warner Robins),each chapter does the best they can to support AFA—and as Region President I’m very proud of all our volunteers.

The Region supports several major installations: Robins AFB and Moody AFB in Georgia; Pope Field and Seymour Johnson AFB in NC; Charleston AFB and Shaw AFB in SC: as well as the Air Force Climatology Center near Asheville, NC. The chapters within the Region actively support 15 Air Force ROTC detachments at colleges and universities, and over 50 AFJROTC units and Civil Air Patrol squadrons.

If you look at the Region as a whole, you can see that Educating the Public, in fact, Aerospace Education, is right at the top of our mission. The region provides a large number of scholarships and grants to individuals and schools in support of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The chapters near USAF bases all participate heavily in sponsoring and presenting Pitsenbarger Awards to CCAF graduates. Also, several chapters near USAF bases provide direct support to STARBASE programs. Seymour Johnson AFB just celebrated their 20th year of STARBASE—a fantastic milestone for a program that educates rising 5th graders about the Air Force. In addition, all three State organizations have robust Teacher of the Year recognition programs. In 2009, 2005, 2003, and 2001 the top AFA National Teacher of the Year award winners came from the Region. Chapters within the Southeast Region sponsor over 70 Visions of Exploration classrooms, led by the Swamp Fox Chapter in SC which alone sponsors 28 Visions programs in several schools in the Sumter area. Even chapters that are not near AF Installations work tirelessly in supporting AE.

The region is employing a two prong attack to further our support of Aerospace Education. We believe Cyber Patriot is crucial to AFAs support of STEM. But to streamline the process of getting the word out about CP, we realize that we needed to become partners with other organizations that also believe strongly in STEM. In the past year, leaders from North Carolina AFA have been networking with STEM consortiums both in industry and state government in NC. On the 1st of August this year, leaders from the South Carolina AFA will participate with a booth at the SC Summit on STEM Education in Greenville, SC. Eventually our goal is to have a STEM Collaborative effort throughout the region and improve our region’s participation in Cyber Patriot and all STEM initiatives.

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