Tag: issue corps

Categories
Success Stories

Diversity and Inclusion Experience Spurs Minnesota Professionals to Advocate Up the Chain of Command

silveira and marczak at the designathonMost employers buy into training and developing their employees so that they can be better employees.  But two University of Minnesota extension professionals determined that they needed to do more.  They decided that their charge was not only to “keep and grow” extension paraprofessionals in the Expanded Food and Nutrition Education Program, but also to prepare them to leave for other employment.  Radical thought!

“We are developing them not just for us but for them so that when they leave us, they leave with a more robust portfolio where they can be marketable elsewhere and obtain a more livable, higher-wage job,” says Mary Marczak, Director of the Urban Family Development program.

One “aha moment” the women had was when they realized that they need to do a better job of “communicating up and down the system” to inform others of the value of nutrition educators’ work.

Cassie Silveira, EFNEP Coordinator and Extension Educator, says the four-county area surrounding Minneapolis is “amazingly diverse.”  One-third of the growth in recent population has come from international immigration, including people from Laos, Somalia, Ethiopia and Viet Nam. Nutrition educators need to reflect the diversity of the population to do their jobs, but they also need their own upward mobility.

Marczak’s and Silveira’s thoughts about paraprofessionals’ mobility needs crystallized into action steps at an eXtension Diversity and Inclusion “designathon,” a structured opportunity for extension personnel to sit around the table with other professionals to create educational programs that benefit their communities at large.  The designathon is one component of the Impact Collaborative process, in which extension professionals are supported to accelerate the adoption of innovation in local programming.  Each designathon encourages educators to visually map out concepts; get feedback from peers across their states; learn from “key informants,” who are national content or technology experts; explore avenues for funding; and discuss ways to communicate new ideas to their colleagues and potential partners.

One “aha moment” the women had was when the designathon led to story mapping.  They realized that although they know the value of what they are doing, they need to do a better job of “communicating up and down the system” with associate deans, assistant deans and others to inform them of the value of the educators’ work, too. Two specific policy changes for which the professionals are advocating are getting more dollars for staff professional development and opening up university training or courses for nutrition educators.  The designathon experience “helped us refine our story,” Silveira says.

Evaluation results from the February 2017 designathon found that 27 of the 55 participants said the experience helped to push their project forward – most frequently described as finding dedicated work time in a supportive environment.  This is particularly important as only 18 percent of Impact Collaborative project teams in 2017 said they are able to meet regularly, while 37 percent said they never are able to meet and work.

Do designathons have a future in changing how extension workers work?  Very likely.  As one participant said, “I plan to use the process again.  I didn’t think we could get this much done.”

For more information about EFNEP in Minnesota, contact:

Cassie Silveira at silv0100@umn.edu or 612-625-5205 or Mary Marczak at:
marcz001@umn.edu or 612-625-8419

Want to structure a designathon? Contact Terry Meisenbach at: tmeisenbach@extension.org

Click on the link for more information about the eXtension Diversity and Inclusion Impact Collaborative.

 

Categories
Newsroom

eXtension News Roundup – January 2017

The monthly news roundup highlights the launch of the Diversity and Inclusion Corps, gives updates on two fellowship projects, and previews some exciting professional development opportunities.

Seger and Hill To Be Featured in JCEP Panel

Reminder! “Purposeful Leadership: Preparing for the Edge” is the subject of a virtual town hall webinar that will be broadcast from the national Joint Council of Extension Professionals (JCEP) leadership conference. Innovation and emerging issues in Extension were identified by JCEP as a critical national conversation.

Panelists include the co-leaders of the Educational Technology Learning Network (EdTechLN), Jamie Seger and Paul Hill on “What defines ‘Innovation’ in Extension?” and “Innovation in Action.” William Hoffman, National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) Chief of Staff will discuss “How NIFA Invests in Innovation.” Dr. Nick Place, Dean for Extension and Director of the Florida will discuss “Building University-Community Engagement In Today’s World.”  The webinar will be held Wednesday, February 8, 2017, at 1:00-2:15 EST. Register for the webinar…

Diversity and Inclusion Issue Corps Launched

The Diversity & Inclusion Issue Corps is up and running with the first professional development event, a conversation about evaluation led by Scott Cummings of Texas A&M. The teams will further refine their project plans on February 14-15, 2017, at a Designathon held in Cincinnati, Ohio. This event features an exercise in concept mapping led by design expert Paul Pangaro and is supported by one-on-one mentoring by 22 Key Informants. Browse the Issue Corps projects by Institution…

Do Not Miss This Exciting Event on Data Visualization

In a follow-up to the well-received “Conversation About Evaluation,” eXtension is producing a webinar on “Data Visualization.” The presentation is targeted especially toward members of the Diversity and Inclusion Issue Corps but is open and useful to anyone in Cooperative Extension that wants to learn more about effective and attractive ways to present data. March 2, 2017, at 3:00 pm EST. Learn more and register for the webinar…

Piestrak Completes eXtension Fellowship

Nearly 100 people attended a January 19 webinar on “Land Grant Informatics: eXtension Fellowship Final Report” by Jeff Piestrak, Cornell University. Jeff recently completed a year-long fellowship with eXtension and the Cornell Mann Library in which he focused on how Extension Professionals can more effectively and collectively link and leverage digital resources and expertise in support of their research, learning and outreach activities, and Land Grant mission. Jeff also wrote a series of blog posts on “Solving for Pattern.” Check out the webinar recording…

Call for Innovation Projects Receives Large Response

The 2017 call for innovation projects resulted in over 90 pre-submissions with just over 30 of those being invited to submit full proposals. The eXtension Innovation Lab plans to announce the projects selected for funding in late February 2017. The purpose of the Lab is to help Cooperative Extension professionals make visible and measurable impacts by discovering, incubating, assessing, and accelerating the adoption of innovation. Innovation grants are a benefit open to professionals at eXtension Premium Member Institutions. The 2017 call focused on trends and topics identified in the Horizon Report: Cooperative Extension Edition.

eXtension LearnDo Not Miss These Great Webinars

Several eXtension communities and Extension professionals around the country have developed a tremendous offering of webinars for February. Here is small selection:

Webinar recordings and related resources are posted on the link for that webinar in Learn, often within 24 hours after the webinar ends.

Categories
i-Three Corps Impact Information

i-Three Issue Corps – Pollinator Spaces Project Expands

I am excited to say that in 2016 the Pollinator Spaces Project registered over 60 new gardens in 20 Georgia counties.  As other gardeners have heard about the project we have been asked to continue the project into 2017.   We are happy to do so!

Oakhurst Community Garden Pollinator Space – complete with pollinator!

The Georgia Pollinator Census

After working with this initiative for a year we decided to add a new part to the project: the Georgia Pollinator Census.   The Georgia Pollinator Census initiative asks school and community gardeners who are experienced in growing pollinator habitat to identify and count pollinators.   There are two goals for the project.  The first is to find out if there is a difference in numbers and types of pollinating insects in rural, suburban and urban areas.  Secondly, we want to expand the insect knowledge of the gardeners.

How will the project work?

As a gardening group is interested in the project they contact me to sign up.  They will receive an insect identification/collection kit (thanks to grant monies) and an identification number.   I will deliver three aster plants to the gardens.  These plants will be put in the ground in the spring to mature and have many blossoms by September.

Gardeners will be trained on insect identification through in-person workshops, website resources, and videos.  I will also be available to assist gardeners, along with their county ANR Extension agents.

Many asters are Georgia natives that are very attractive to insects.

We will ask the gardeners to count during the month of September, once a week for three weeks.  We are asking for 15 minute count times, counting insects only on the aster.  They will log their counts on the website using their individual identification number.  We hope for up to 50 volunteer groups for this project.

Since the gardeners that have reported new pollinator habitat are from 19 very diverse Georgia counties, we are hopeful that we will get volunteers for the project from rural, suburban and urban gardens.  It will be interesting to see if the the pollinator counts are different.  And, we are hoping in inspire a few new entomologists!

Categories
Success Stories

“As If You Were There…” The Little Video Project That Grew

Jennifer VolkJennifer Volk’s i-Three Issue Corps project seeks to share stories of agriculture and forestry climate adaptation and mitigation practices across the 12-state Northeast Region. Recent weather variability in this area—unusually dry in the north to unusually wet in West Virginia—indicated a need for quickly produced, easily shared information for farmers, ranchers and forest owners about established adaptation and mitigation practices that were proving effective. To meet this need, in 2015 the Northeast Climate Hub University Partnership envisioned creating an online showcase of examples, and Jennifer volunteered to investigate using 360-degree panoramic photography to provide viewers with virtual tours of demonstration sites where they could see and learn about these practices from the practitioners. The impact Jennifer and the USDA Northeast Climate Hub are seeking is to create a widespread network of information, education and referral resources across the region that will speed their audiences’ adoption of these practices, when needed. At the NeXC2016 Conference, Jennifer used the Designathon to develop and refine her work plan and evaluation strategy. She also made many contacts with key informants and colleagues who could advise her on the leap she was about to make into, for her, a totally new technology. An especially important resource has been key informant and eXtension Innovation Project Awardee Shane Bradt who introduced her to story mapping, which will play an important role as the project concludes, bringing together all the tours to present the completed project and its resources to the world. Jennifer is an Extension Specialist with the University of Delaware Cooperative Extension.

Like most of the United States, the Northeast has been experiencing weather variability that is requiring its citizens—and particularly its farmers, ranchers and forest owners—to adapt and respond in new ways to protect their livelihoods. This includes adopting new practices or operational changes that they have not tried before and that potentially entail risk.

“Landowners want first to see a new technique being used effectively before they invest time or money in trying it,” says Jennifer Volk, Environmental Quality Extension Specialist with University of Delaware Cooperative Extension. “That’s why demonstration sites are so effective. And it’s also why websites featuring videos and other multimedia techniques are so helpful in accelerating change.”

So in fall 2015, when Jennifer was attending a Northeast Climate Hub meeting that was considering creating an online showcase of the climate change adaptation and mitigation strategies currently practiced across the 12-state region, she stepped up and offered to explore various forms of media that might be used—and particularly 360-degree photography and videos. Her offer was accepted. Shortly thereafter she learned of the launch of eXtension’s new i-Three Issue Corps and recognized the access Issue Corps membership would give her to consulting and technology support that could guide her in this venture.

First Steps: Research and Project Management

Setting up a photo shoot.

Jennifer, with collaboration and support from Erin Lane, Northeast Climate Hub Coordinator, and Karrah Kwasnik, Northeast Climate Hub Digital Content Manager, launched the research she needed to execute the project. The research had two components. First was the 360-degree photo and video technology:  its best uses, the limitations of 360-degree multimedia for website posting, and obtaining advice and consulting from others in Cooperative Extension who had used it. Second was the content: the various adaptation and mitigation techniques (such as high tunnels and cover crops), types of agriculture or climate conditions in which each can be used, and where good examples were located throughout the region.

“In no time I recognized this was a larger project than one person could do without leveraging the effort,” Jennifer recalls. She soon found herself organizing production teams to visit and photograph sites at the land-grant universities in each of the 12 states (plus D.C.) in the Northeast Region. These teams, all working simultaneously, set out to identify the examples of techniques, the types of producers using each, and the potential demonstration sites in the northern, middle, and southern parts of the region.

“Creating a virtual field tour using 360-degree photography sounds like such an exciting thing to do,” says Jennifer. “I would go home at night and my daughter, with big expectations, would ask me what I did today, and I had to tell her—I was on the phone. Setting up meetings, organizing site visits, briefing site visitors, asking owners of sites if they might agree to the video. In every dimension, this project has grown and grown.”

Jennifer credits the Designathon at eXtension’s NeXC2016 conference for forcing her to have intense focus on her project and to get the entire plan on paper for her to take back and share with Erin. “At NeXC it went from an idea to actually happening—the design concept and project management plan to make it happen,” she says.

Getting Down to Work:  Implementation and Production

Our production team reviewing the 360 photos taken at the DSU Smyrna Outreach & Research Center: John Gattuso, Gattuso Media Design; Karrah Kwasnik, Digital Content Manager for the Northeast Climate Hub through the University of New Hampshire; and Jackie Arpie, Extension Scholar with the University of Delaware.

In mid-July, Jennifer and her three production teams took delivery of their virtual kits—each containing a 360-degree camera, a tripod, and a tablet to remotely operate the camera and view the photos in the field. However, she laments, “This technology is so new and cutting edge, that even the experienced photographers on our team are novices with this equipment!”

This required another planning step in addition to developing the shot lists once they learned of the subjects and techniques to be captured at each site. The teams needed to discuss their overall strategy and decide on standards for data collection, processing, and sharing. In addition to initial equipment testing, field sample tests were needed to test the camera settings for positioning of the camera, exposure, reflection, backlighting and other shooting complications.

Another requirement was the preparation of a set of orientation points for the site managers and comprehensive storyboarding questions to ask site hosts and managers prior to and during the shoot.

“It’s very important to document the sites carefully, since traveling and revisiting them to capture what we missed will be very difficult,” says Jennifer. “We need to know all the information about the site, the people working there, the adaptation and mitigation practices, the benefits the growers have experienced from the practices and the challenges that they faced in trying to implement them.”

Finally, in mid-August, shooting started. From the beginning, Jennifer and Erin had the end in mind: a portfolio of multimedia, web-based virtual tours they named “As If You Were There.” By mid-September, Jennifer estimated that the shooting of the project—still photos, 360-degree photos, video interviews with site managers and others—plus supporting content such as descriptive text, fact sheets, contact information, and other educational resources were approximately one-third done.

For Jennifer, the creative work she has been looking forward to will now begin: the organizing of all of this material into stories. “There’s so much to do,” she says, “editing videos, selecting what to use, then building our virtual tours on RoundMe, a platform where viewers can move through our demonstration sites from one 360-degree image to the next and interact with the images by clicking on icons that will open embedded still photos, videos, and other linked informational materials.”

The capstone of the project will be connecting all the demonstration stories together in a story map so viewers can see a geographic overview of entire Northeast project and visit the sites that interest them.

Meanwhile, the project continues to grow with now as many as 22 stories planned. The tours will be released in phases as they become available, with the initial release planned for early 2017. First audiences to be targeted to view the virtual tours will be Extension professionals and other university researchers and technology service providers so that they can consider both the content and the approach for their possible use.

Categories
Success Stories

Increasing Seafood Consumption among Populations with Heart Health Risks

Ingrid Adams
Ingrid Adams
Ingrid Adam’s i-Three Issue Corps project addresses the issue of low seafood consumption in low-income populations and their higher risk of heart disease with an education program on the benefits of eating seafood. The impact she is seeking is to convince these families to eat seafood two times per week. When Ingrid arrived at the NeXC2016 Conference, she and Jennifer Austin, her project partner, had launched a trial of their planned program and were dissatisfied with the results. Key informants at the conference challenged Ingrid to rethink her approach, both how she was offering her program and her messaging. The Designathon helped her reconceptualize her project to create a new format that engages her audience where they shop rather than in a classroom and revise her messaging from an emphasis on “what the research says” to “how choosing seafood is in the interest of your family.” An outcome is an innovative approach to engaging low-income populations in nutrition education that she hopes can be adopted and successfully practiced at Extension programs across the country. Ingrid is an Associate Extension Professor with the University of Kentucky.

Engaging low-income populations in nutrition education programming is notoriously difficult. When Ingrid Adams, University of Kentucky Associate Extension Professor and Specialist in Nutrition and Weight Management proposed her i-Three Issue Corps project, she knew that audience engagement could be a challenge from the outset.

When asked how her i-Three Issue Corps and NeXC2016 experience helped her, Ingrid replies, “It made me think about the future, about changing how we do business, about meeting people where they are to increase our impact.”

Ingrid’s Issue Corps project addresses the issue of higher incidences of heart disease in low-income populations caused by unbalanced diets. In particular, research shows that low-income families and individuals typically do not include enough seafood in their diets to get the heart-healthy benefits of omega-3 fatty acids and other nutrients.

“I had an opportunity to partner with a national association, the Seafood Nutrition Partnership, which is conducting an intervention in eight cities, including Lexington, Clark County, Kentucky,” recalls Ingrid. “We use research and focus on encouraging the low-income audience to prevent heart disease by increasing their consumption of seafood to two times per week.”

Creating a New Model

Prior to eXtension’s NeXC2016 Conference in March, Ingrid, in collaboration with Family and Consumer Sciences Agent Jennifer Austin, launched their first education outreach, offering a 1.5-hour class session one night each week for four weeks at the Extension Office. Eight families attended the four-week session, but by the follow-up session, only one family returned for the session where Ingrid and Jennifer planned to collect their impact evaluation data. As an experienced educator and specialist who has consistently won recognition for the content and approach of her programs, Ingrid arrived at eXtension’s March NeXC2016 wondering: “Now what? What do we try next?”

At the conference, the Designathon held for Issue Corp members introduced Ingrid to concept mapping, encouraging her to rethink her original education delivery plan. She also met with a key-informant expert in communications and marketing who challenged her to consider: “Why not take your program to where your audiences are and keep your presentations short, concise and high energy—no more than 15 minutes? More like the Ignite Sessions at the NeXC conference?”

When Ingrid returned to Kentucky, she launched a whole new approach.  She developed relationships with local food pantries, WIC (The Special Supplemental Nutrition Program for Women, Infants, and Children) and Head Start to gain access to their audiences. She effectively condensed her presentation to 15-minute sessions followed by demonstrations and taste testing. As part of the research process at the food pantries, she identified all the seafood products they carried and created product lists. She tagged the shelves to identify where the seafood products were located, and she created short, simple recipes for handout–she even cooked one up to share!

“It’s important to weave critical thinking throughout this approach,” she says. “It’s empowering for people to see how the choices they make can be in the best interest of their children and families.”

The response has been gratifying. Food-pantry clients are engaged by the quick, convenient on-site approach and often take immediate action, selecting seafood products and carrying away the recipes and product lists. Tracking seafood inventory following presentations informs impact evaluation.

Discovering the Best Message

When asked how her i-Three Issue Corps and NeXC2016 experience helped her, Ingrid replies, “It made me think about the future, about changing how we do business, about meeting people where they are to increase our impact.”

In particular, advice provided by Ingrid’s Issue Corps key informant prompted her to rethink how she was shaping her messages. Advised to talk with members of her audiences more about why they might now want to increase their consumption of seafood, she learned that they were far less interested in research findings on lowering the risk of heart disease than in wanting to be sure they would be around for their children and grandchildren–that they would live to know them well and to enjoy them.

“My Issue Corps experience completely changed my project from focusing on persuading with research and content to making sure I started working to get people to the table and empowering them by talking about what was important to them.” she says.

Originally Ingrid intended her project to refine her traditionally modeled program, then offer it to Kentucky Extension educators statewide. Now she aspires to refine her new approach and messaging, then scale up her new model for use by Extension professionals nationwide for connecting with low-income audiences to deliver nutrition and health education.

Categories
Success Stories

Pollinator Spaces: Promoting Pollinator Conservation and Sustainability

Becky GriffinBecky Griffin’s i-Three Issue Corps project is dedicated to creating gardens that support pollinator habitats and provide hands-on pollinator education throughout Georgia. The impact she is seeking is to increase pollinator awareness in her state by facilitating the development of school and community gardens and supporting the effort with high-quality, engaging communications. At the NeXC2016 Conference, she gleaned advice from key informants that she applied to achieve an award-winning gardening blog and to integrate management of her social media to facilitate message delivery across platforms. Finally, she applied what she learned about story mapping to create a map showing the many locations and photos of the completed pollinator spaces–a visible, measurable evaluation of her project’s progress and results. Becky is a community and school garden coordinator with the University of Georgia Extension.

When Becky Griffin first learned of eXtension’s i-Three Issue Corps initiative in fall 2015, she immediately recognized an opportunity to expand the impact of her gardening program for 2016.

“Being part of the Issue Corps is one of the best things I’ve done in my professional life,” Becky says.

Becky, who is University of Georgia Extension’s community and school garden coordinator, worked in the past primarily with food gardeners. However, for 2016 she envisioned introducing education on pollinators and their habitat needs into her work.  Increasingly in past years, her community gardeners, both rural and urban, were experiencing a decline in typically abundant crops, such as cucumbers and squash, that require pollinators.

Addressing the Needs of Pollinators

The decline of pollinators—not just domestic honey bees (which most people think of as the pollinators), but wild native bees, wasps, butterflies and even birds and bats—has been so alarming in Georgia that the state has developed a statewide plan to promote public awareness and proactive stewardship of its pollinator workforce.

Through her Issue Corps Pollinator Spaces Project, Becky set out to create experiential learning opportunities for students and community members about the needs of pollinators by adding pollinator habitats into their gardens statewide. Her project required exceptional energy and project management skills, covering communities and presentations throughout the state. It also required strong communication outreach.

Becky looked to her Issue Corps experience to provide her with professional development in using the right mix of social media effectively. She needed to support her volunteer gardeners with educational resources, to record and share photos of the new gardens and to inform the public about these special gardens and their purpose: to address the urgent issue of declining pollinator populations.

Agility in the Face of Change

Green Meadows Community Garden Pollinator Plants
Green Meadows Community Garden Pollinator Space

Georgia had an early planting season in 2016, making it easier for Becky to travel the state giving presentations to schools and community gardening groups, gaining their commitment and capturing information for tracking their progress. This was the first step in her goal of creating behavior change—getting them to deliberately include pollinator spaces in their gardens.  As an inducement, she distributed seeds for Sulphur Cosmos, a pollinator-favorite flower.

Early in the growing season, however, concern about the mosquito-borne zika virus gripped the state, prompting gardeners and public members to begin heavy spraying of pesticides.

“It was what I call a light-bulb moment—a teaching moment,” says Becky. “Most people, including many of my project gardeners, didn’t understand that mosquito-targeting pesticides can kill all sorts of insects. I found myself unexpectedly having to focus on pesticide education: ‘Don’t ever spray on the blooms. Don’t spray during the pollinator’s working hours between early morning and sundown.’”

“Pesticide management is critical,” Becky adds. “Georgia is still not seeing the butterflies we were hoping for. Education about the habits and homes of native bees is essential—they can be mistaken for pests and attacked with pesticides.  I’ve also created classes on protecting honeybees,” says Becky who is a certified beekeeper.

Then, unexpectedly Georgia experienced record heat and went into a drought. Mosquitos all but disappeared. Becky’s education focus had to shift to emphasize planting heat and drought-tolerant varieties (Sulphur Cosmos luckily are), recognizing symptoms of heat stress in a garden and responding with proper irrigation practices.

Communication Strategies That Delivered

Becky credits her i-Three Issue Corps experience and eXtension’s March NeXC2016 Conference, particularly the day spent with key-informant experts, for her agility in adapting her messaging while maintaining the momentum of her social media outreach to her many followers. At this writing, she has more than 80 gardens and hundreds of volunteers in her project.

“Being part of the Issue Corps is one of the best things I’ve done in my professional life,” Becky says. “There are so many things I can point to that helped me. A key-informant reviewed my blog website and urged me to ‘use more voice’ to make the content more friendly, personal, sharing my failures as well as successes with my own garden.” This advice alone led to a big increase in hits, and Becky’s gardening blog website was selected in July as Number 20 among the top 100 gardening blog sites.

Other benefits she cites are the Impact Statement Reporting Course on eXtension.org, “where I learned how to measure impact and behavior change.” She also praises the social media expert group at NeXC2016 who taught her “how to be smarter with social media, how to report more judiciously on Facebook, and how to run it all from my website.”

Perhaps the showcase of her expanded communication skill is her just-completed story map, developed with coaching from eXtension Innovation Project Awardee Shane Bradt of the University of New Hampshire. Becky met Shane, leader of eXtension’s Geospatial Technology community, at NeXC2016.  She was referred to him after asking if anyone knew a strategy for using photos, like those of the pollinator spaces she was collecting, for evaluating a project.

Becky’s story map communicates the spirit and achievement of her Pollinator Spaces Project far better than any article, such as this, can. Clearly, Becky’s project and innovative approach to sharing it throughout Georgia suggest a model that other Extension professionals might adopt for increasing pollinator awareness and protection in their states.

Categories
Success Stories

Connecting University Students and Community through Gardening

Andrea MorrisAndrea Morris and Rudy Pacumbaba’s project set out to be a community garden with nutrition and physical activity education programming. By the NeXC2016 Conference, the dimension of service learning for freshman students at Alabama A&M had been added. At the conference, their exposure to key informants and new technology thinking resulted in “light-bulb” moments that expanded their project with an app, solidified their evolving plan in a concept map and introduced them to Working Out Loud which they plan to apply to achieve more rapid program development in the future. Both Andrea and Rudy are Extension Specialists with Alabama A&M University.

In Huntsville, Alabama, the E-3 Garden Project will soon to be up and running full speed ahead in the community of Edmonton Heights, an underserved community with primarily African-American residents. This innovative eXtension i-Three Issue Corps project represents a blending of two opportunities that came together to Engage, Educate and Empower both residents of Edmonton Heights and freshman students at Alabama A&M University.

“Today’s culture is fluid. It requires vigilance and quick movement on change,” says Rudy. “Working out loud is intuitive and interactive. It provides a new way of conceptualizing and building programs that will enable us to get ideas out early, get feedback, develop programs, test them and respond more rapidly. The working out loud model fits perfectly for this.”

Rudy Pacumbaba, Alabama Cooperative Extension Specialist in urban horticulture, had for some time been eyeing the Crawford Park part of Edmonton Heights adjacent to the Alabama A&M campus as a potential site for a community garden.

He and Andrea Morris, Extension Health and Nutrition Specialist, had collaborated on some work with schools in the past, and both were looking for a new way to do outreach to Edmonton Heights. Together, with Rudy’s skills in garden development and Andrea’s as a nutritionist, they were more likely to succeed at engaging the community on a garden. When Rudy was asked to help the university with a new freshman student service-learning initiative, he and Andrea found the catalyst that would bring their community garden project to life.

“We put those two initiatives together—the community garden and the university’s desire to get students really working in the community,” recalls Andrea. “We saw a way to engage, educate and empower both community and students on topics of nutrition, physical activity, conservation–and of course gardening!”

A Slow but Promising Start

The first phase of the plan—the first service-learning class and site preparation—was launched in spring 2016, and it was anticipated the new garden would be planted at the end of spring semester. However, delays in the start of the growing season pressured the students’ involvement, and they were delayed in getting the project ready. Unfortunately, when that first class was unable to launch the garden before spring semester ended, there were not enough summer students around to hold the service learning class. However, a full class is lined up for fall, and it will finish site preparation and put in a fall crop. ”Delayed, but still going forward,” confirms Rudy, “The university is really excited about it.”

Meanwhile, Andrea is completing her work on developing nutrition and food safety education materials that will be shared by students and community members and available on the web, in education program handouts and even at locations in the garden. Eventually, Andrea plans to add physical education to this list, incorporating physical activity education and stations to complement the gardening work. “It will be a one-stop education place on gardening, food, and exercise. We want participants to get all they can from it,” she says.

Multiple Benefits from the Issue Corps Experience

As Issue Corp members, Rudy and Andrea praise the new-model, highly interactive learning experience they had at the NeXC2016 Conference in March 2016. Some of the highlights of that experience for informing their project include the exposure to emerging technologies, the designathon and working out loud. All of these have prompted changes and enhancements — to their project.

“All of the technology was amazing to me,” says Andrea. “Thinking about it provided us with a light bulb moment.”

SOW AppEarlier, the Alabama Extension’s Home Grounds, Gardens, and Home Pests programming team had created an app called “SOW” for home gardeners. Suddenly they realized they could add it into the E-3 Garden Project to support participants, add more functionality to the project and attract more public notice.

The original SOW app provides individuals throughout Alabama with a planting guide and calendar for planning their gardens by day, month and seasons, with information on what is best to plant at what time, how to grow each plant, potential growing problems and how to address them.

“By integrating the app into our garden project,” says Rudy, “we can use it to schedule and monitor student work times, introduce the student project to Edmonton Heights community gardeners and also encourage community members to start home gardens behind their houses.”

“What better way is there to work with millennial students?” adds Andrea. “It’s a great opportunity for us, for Alabama, and since the idea has not yet been applied in other states, it can go there too—it’s scalable.”

During the designathon, Rudy and Andrea found that concept mapping helped them better define the steps in their project in a way that energized it and got it moving. They’ve shared concept mapping with colleagues, and Andrea is looking forward to using it in the new grant year to develop project proposals.

Finally, Working Out Loud rang a bell for Rudy, who sees it as a breakthrough strategy for the rapid development of any initiative—an essential response required in today’s Extension education environment.

“Today’s culture is fluid. It requires vigilance and quick movement on change,” says Rudy. “Working Out Loud is intuitive and interactive. It provides a new way of conceptualizing and building programs that will enable us to get ideas out early, get feedback, develop programs, test them and respond more rapidly. The Working Out Loud model fits perfectly for this.”

Categories
Success Stories

A Down-Home Approach to Meeting a Global Challenge

Alice HennemanAlice Henneman’s i-Three Issue Corps project promotes personal awareness and behavior change to reduce consumer food waste. Using educational tools consumers are familiar with, such as food audits, daily logs of food wasted and recipes that teach them new shopping and meal considerations, she is developing a whole new curriculum that she is rolling out locally for statewide and, potentially, national adoption. At the NeXC2016 conference, she networked extensively with other Extension professionals to test her concepts, collect suggestions and refine her project plan. Through working with the key informants she gained the confidence and tips encouraging her to “think bigger” and build plans for scalability into her project that are being realized as the project progresses. Alice is an RDN and University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension Educator. She serves Lancaster County in Nebraska.

Throughout her life, Alice has had a close relationship with food from growing up on a farm to embarking on a career as a Registered Dietitian Nutritionist who chose to focus on consumer food concerns. As an award-winning educator with the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Extension in Lancaster County, she is now recognized nationally and locally as a leader and innovator in food, nutrition and food safety education for communities, families, and individuals.

When eXtension announced the i-Three Issue Corps in late 2015, Alice anticipated it could provide the support she needed to develop an innovation for her program and organizational food website, food.unl.edu, which serves Nebraska as well as national and international visitors.

Making a Ginormous Task Personal and Doable

In particular, Alice values the time she spent with the key-informant experts, and how they provided a one-stop, multi-topic consultation. The Designathon helped her expand possibilities while also recognizing parameters, resulting in a more precise and concise roadmap for her project.

The innovation Alice was eager to pursue was ignited by an article in National Geographic Magazine on “Feeding 9 Billion” and the projection that by 2050, we’ll need to feed two billion more people.

Through research on the topic, Alice learned as much as 40 percent of the overall edible food produced in the United States is wasted each year. In response to this, Alice proposed an Issue Corps project to develop and add a comprehensive new education component to the food website, promoting awareness and practices for reducing food waste. Her hope for the project was that it would be scalable for use by the entire Cooperative Extension System.

“While many people think the solutions are mainly agricultural and commercial interventions and innovations, they really don’t realize consumers also CAN do something about it in their own food practices. They can be part of meeting the challenge, and each person can go home and begin immediately.”

An important tool in her education and behavior change plan is a food audit. Alice notes that there’s a laundry list of food waste reduction practices people can be encouraged to do, but that some are quite complicated and not scalable.

“Like with fitness or other habits, it helps if you keep track of what you waste as you do it,” she says.  “Better to do a simple audit for a day or week—similar to keeping track of what you eat–then you can go back and really think about it. Then you realize it’s YOU, and you can see what you can do about it. Awareness becomes personal.”

Moving Forward Quickly with a Multi-Faceted Approach

Alice is now working on developing resources, like the food waste audit tool to add to the food website and use in programming in Lancaster County and beyond. She credits the Issue Corps and the NeXC2016 Conference experience for moving her original concept rapidly into development.

In particular, Alice values the time she spent with the key-informant experts, and how they provided a one-stop, multi-topic consultation. The Designathon helped her expand possibilities while also recognizing parameters, resulting in a more precise and concise roadmap for her project.

At the conference, Alice spent a good deal of time talking and brainstorming with other attendees. She found that these discussions, as well as the communications experts’ advice, honed her approach for reaching consumers.

Trash can filled with food
As much as 40% of the food in the United States is wasted yearly.

“I came to realize that “Feeding 9 Billion” would not motivate consumers as it did me,” she admits. “I was coached to think about what resonates: money lost, and people like fresh food. Over lunch with another attendee who is in communications, she produced what is now my slogan: ‘Food Tossed Is Money Lost.’” Alice now has this up on Pinterest where it’s having an impact in Lancaster County and beyond, with people from other states joining her network and following the new content.

Finally, she’s conceptualized a new way of doing recipes to reduce food waste that educates about ways to prevent waste and what to do with what might become waste. She and her coworkers are working on special recipes for individuals and families, with many education topics integrated into them—feeding tips for children; food safety; and incorporating foods often consumed in less than recommended amounts, like fresh fruit and vegetables, into meals.

“Recipes can teach at the teachable moment,” Alice says. “If something is left over in a recipe, what can you do with it? It’s a time to think about providing answers to questions like, How do you freeze things for later use? How do you store foods for best safety and quality?”

Alice claims her i-Three Issue Corps experience made her “think bigger.” She is currently planning a presentation for a local medical center, “Leftover Makeovers and Refrigerator Reboots” which she plans to share with others and expand into such possible venues as online videos. She also is considering some type of downloadable eBook on preventing food waste when purchasing and preparing fresh produce, whether at a grocery store, farmers’ market or through a Community Supported Agriculture share.

Categories
Success Stories

Dry Farming: Growing Fruits and Vegetables without Water

Amy GarrettAmy Garrett’s i-Three Issue Corps project focuses on establishing and leveraging a set of social media strategies to share dry farming practices widely. From the NeXC2016 Conference and her Issue Corps experience, she has expanded her social media horizons, incorporated Working Out Loud strategies into her Facebook outreach to expand the network of participants in dry farming in Oregon and to identify and partner with a national network of water conservation experts to submit grants to expand her project further. Amy is a County Agent in Benton County and Assistant Professor of Practice serving Linn, Benton, and Lane Counties for Oregon State University Extension.

In recent years, reduced snowmelt, higher temperatures, and drought have presented growing climate risks to farmers in the Pacific Northwest. In response, five years ago, Amy Garrett, became interested in finding ways to grow fruits and vegetables with little or no water. Her search led to a reawakening of dry farming, an age-old set of practices predating the widespread development of irrigation.

At NeXC2016, Amy profited from the new experience of an “actively working conference,” where Issue Corps members collaborated and shared plans for their projects. Both peer participants and key informants exposed her to new technologies, new processes and new contacts. “I know these will all stick with me,” she says, “and I have approached my project differently from before conference.”

“One of the most common questions I get at the Extension office is, ‘I just moved on to this piece of land, and I’m trying to figure out what I can grow here,’” says Amy, “and I was discovering that, more often than not, people were on land without water or limited water availability.”

Then about three years ago, she met a farmer in his seventies who has been dry farming fruits and vegetables for the past 40 years with no irrigation, first in California for 30 years, now just south of Corvallis. Amy began case studying his work, dropping by every month during the growing season to take pictures documenting his practices. Later in the season, she held a Field Day at his farm, wrote an article about what he was doing, and interest in dry farming started to grow.

Testing the Principles with Gratifying Results

Dry FarmingIn 2015, Amy decided to take this farmer’s practices and do a demonstration of them at an Oregon State University site, growing some of the same crops he had grown the same way she had seen him do it. When 2015 turned into a year of extreme drought, she was uncertain what would happen, but by midsummer, things were looking good, and they started harvesting tomatoes and melons in July.

“I decided to organize a Field Day at the site in early August 2015,” Amy reports. “I anticipated about 20 to 30 people would show up. We had 100 show up because everyone was being impacted by the drought in different ways and wanted to know how this was done.” Media coverage followed and people began contacting Amy, wanting to know more about how dry farming works.

“Traditionally Oregon State research has focused on yield maximization,” says Amy “Dry farming is not a yield maximization strategy, so there’s not a lot of information on how to grow tomatoes, potatoes, squash, melon, dry beans and zucchini without irrigation. Dry farming is about helping growers without supplemental irrigation. It’s the old way of farming.”

“Since I was at NeXC2016 in March with the Issue Corps, our dry farming collaborative effort has blossomed. We currently have approximately 20 different growers doing participatory dry farming research,” Amy reports. “I provided plant material for them so they are growing many of the same varieties on different soil types, in different locations, in different little microclimates.”

Using the New to Advance the Old

Meanwhile, additional participants have joined the collaborative, growing it to more than 65 members, with two or three more joining each week. They are connected by an email list and a Facebook page, where they provide pictures, ask questions and provide updates. They can all observe what the plants in different locations look like–tomatoes, melons, squashes, and potatoes—as they flower and ripen.

At NeXC2016, Amy profited from the new experience of an “actively working conference,” where Issue Corps members collaborated and shared plans for their projects. Both peer participants and key informants exposed her to new technologies, new processes and new contacts. “I know these will all stick with me,” she says, “and I have approached my project differently from before conference.”

Her peers and key informants at the conference encouraged her to bring more technology into her project, especially video. “I already had the idea, but not the funding to do it,” she recalls. “I got the video idea from Issue Corps—actually I had the idea but NeXC key informants emphasized it. I didn’t have funding to do video myself, but when I was approached by two different entities wanting to do a story on dry farming, I was able to leverage the opportunity. For helping them produce those two videos on our 2016 August Field Days, I will be able to use them in our curriculum.”

Another technology boost she got at the conference came from meeting Shane Bradt and learning of story mapping. While she doesn’t have the time or resources at present to develop a story map on dry farming and its locations, she anticipates picking that up in the winter, when her collaborative members regroup to assess 2016 evaluation data and plan for 2017.

Amy also adopted Working Out Loud strategies and applied them to her Facebook networking and beyond. She credits them for achieving the increase in collaborative participants, attendees at workshops, her relationship with her local soil conservation district to connect her with their audience. She also acted upon the encouragement of Issue Corps key informants to initiate relationships with contacts who could become partners in her work.

“The key informants and peers at the conference told me that by reaching out for partners, I would strengthen grant proposals,” she says. “That would allow me to design bigger projects—bigger than I can do alone.”

This advice has paid off. Amy has become a proposal partner in a team that has submitted a pre-proposal to the USDA to do research on increasing soil moisture holding capacity. “Hopefully we’ll get invited to submit a proposal.”

Amy has also applied for a USDA grant to look at all the different strategies for growing with minimal or no water. “Dry farming is just one strategy.”

“What we are doing is co-creating the future of how we use water on our farms,” she concludes. “Co-creating. That’s another concept I got from Issue Corps. There are many brilliant farmers in our area—and everywhere. Co-creating brings us together to work on solving our water issues and conserving water to sustain agriculture.”