Christine “Chris” Hamp, president of the National Grange, stands in her backyard outside of Spokane the morning of May 29. Hamp’s priorities include increasing membership and advocacy as she works to usher the long-time organization into a “stronger tomorrow.” (Matthew Weaver/Capital Press)

SPOKANE —  Christine “Chris” Hamp recently visited three North Carolina farms as part of her duties as National Grange president.

One farm rotated between raising corn, soybeans, cotton, tobacco and peanuts. The next had pivoted from Christmas trees to shipping wreathes worldwide. The third farm milked a thousand dairy goats twice a day; kept 200 Black Angus and was contracted to provide 2,500 weaner pigs a week.

“Three totally different operations, all with multiple generations that are engaged in the operation,” Hamp said.

The Grange is a nonprofit grassroots community organization advocating for rural America and farming communities.

Hamp wants to be sure that the Grange’s focus and policies allow farmers, their children and grandchildren to continue in the face of heavy regulations, estate taxes and other challenges.

“The goal every single day is for the Grange to be stronger tomorrow than it is today,” she said. “Every single action we take as an organization needs to have a purpose, it needs to be relevant. And it needs to resonate not only with our current members, but it needs to resonate with those folks who aren’t members yet.”

‘Creating calm out of chaos’

Hamp, 57, stood in the middle of the 20-acre property outside of Spokane that she and husband Duane purchased in 2021.

She spent more than 30 years in state and local government, retiring in early 2023.

She originally planned to be a city manager. During the fire storms of 1994, she got involved with state emergency management part-time and fell in love with the fire service.

She particularly enjoyed being on the incident management team.

“It’s creating calm out of chaos,” she said. “It’s going into communities that have been absolutely devastated and finding a way to help, getting their feet back on the ground.”

She’s been in Grange even longer.

She is a fourth-generation member, growing up on a dairy farm originally homesteaded by her great-grandfather in Monroe, Wash.

When she was 5, she joined Tualco Junior Grange #341, and then Tualco Grange #284. She was elected Grange national president in November 2023.

“There’s not very many days in my entire life that I haven’t thought about or somehow been impacted by the Grange,” Hamp said. “The commitment has to be to leave it better than I found it.”

Membership on the rise

There are about 1,400 local Grange halls, and 140,000 members nationwide. While many civic and social organizations have seen massive losses over the past decades, the Grange has experienced the opposite, with a net gain in membership for 2022 and 2023, and holding steady in 2025.

Another net gain is predicted for 2025, said Phil Vonada, National Grange communications director.

Membership was highest in the 1870s, when nearly every farmer was a Grange member, Vonada said.

Hamp uses the expression: “This is not your grandpa’s Grange.”

“In grandpa’s Grange, people had more time than money,” she said. “A lot of these Granges, every project was done by the membership. Need a new roof? Members showed up Saturday morning, worked all day. Maybe some of the women were in the kitchen making lunch and dinner. Over and over, everything that happened was done with your own hands.”

Dues were suppressed because members paid with their labor in many cases. Today, most people would say that time is their most precious commodity, Hamp said.

“Our members don’t have a ton of time; that’s not the resource that they have to give,” she said. “What we do ask them to do, we have got to make sure it’s on point – that the meetings are relevant and don’t go for hours and hours.”

Hamp envisions a rural-centric conference that encompasses all the important issues —  commodities, education, health care, transportation, infrastructure and insurance.

She challenges members to invite new folks into their Grange halls. That includes mentoring and preparing the next group of members, she said.

“This is why we need you, and why you need the Grange,” she said. “They can’t be the best-kept secret.”

Leadership style

Hamp balances the Grange’s history and traditions with a “fresh and clear vision of what our future can be,” said Joe Stefenoni, a National Grange board member and president of the California Grange.

“Chris is a consummate teacher,” he said. “If you want to know something, she is more than willing to bring you into that circle to teach and to grow that new leadership.”

Policy recommendations are adopted in local Granges, passed by state Granges and moved to the National Grange, which advocates in Washington, D.C. with Congress and other federal agencies.

Hamp has embraced that bottom-up model, said Beth Westbrook, a member of the Grange’s advocacy board.

“She’s a good listener,” Westbrook said. “She’s the type of leader that says, ‘Here’s my vision. What are your thoughts about it?’ She allows things to be tweaked and evolved, until she has consensus.”

Grange members are responding to the opportunities Hamp is presenting, Westbrook said.

“She has the ability to mobilize people to start solving the problems,” she said. “It’s her firewoman hat she’s wearing at that point.”

Advocacy

Hamp has written opinions about a variety of key topics as president, including investment in rural healthcare, rural broadband and the farm bill.

She believes advocacy will be the new big draw to the organization.

“I think a lot of Granges have gotten away from it,” she said. “A lot of granges are not known for their advocacy work, they’re known for their community service work.”

Some folks believe advocacy is harder, don’t think anyone would listen to them or dread a confrontational conversation.

“Standing behind the counter and serving pancakes, it’s kind of hard to get somebody’s tail knotted up,” she said. “But if we sit down and start talking about policy, people get a little itchy about that.”

Advocacy means speaking up for those three-generation farm families and saying, “This is why we do it,” she said. “So they can continue to live the life the way they’ve done it for generations. That has got to be doable.”

Favorite memories

“When you talk to the grandpas, the thing that gets the sparkle in their eye is, they’re talking about the dance, how they met Grandma in the parking lot,” Hamp said. “Everything that brings that sparkle to their eye is some of the shenanigans and fun — that’s where they went to have their social piece.”

Somewhere along the way, a lot of the fun disappeared, she said.

“All of a sudden, people are thinking Grange is supposed to be serious business, and we can’t do that,” she said. “I’ve been through our bylaws and there’s nothing in there that says we can’t have fun while we get this work done.”

For the first time, the Grange national convention Nov. 8-16 will be on a cruise ship, departing from Miami, Fla., to the ABC islands in the Caribbean.

Hamp’s two-year term will end at that meeting. It’s up to the delegates to re-nominate her.

“I serve at the pleasure — if they like what we’re doing, then great,” she said. “And if they don’t, then that’s perfectly fine, too.”

Hamp’s own favorite Grange memories harken back to when she was a kid.

The Monroe Grange hall was an old schoolhouse with a crawlspace that the youth would set up as a Halloween haunted house.

“It was just a dirt floor, musty and damp and cobwebs everywhere — it was perfect for that,” Hamp said. “We’d be down there for a couple of weeks, scurrying around and dragging crap in and making this walk people would have to go through.”

At the same time, Hamp says, they were learning about working together. How to vote in favor of or against something, even if it was to vote against something your best friend suggested. How to decide in a meeting what to do with the money you raised. How to be a good neighbor. How to be a good citizen. The importance of being part of the process.

“It’s all these things about life that you learned,” Hamp said. “I just happened to learn them in Grange.”