rapid iteration – Extension Foundation

Andrea 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.”

Earlier, 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.”

Alice 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.

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.