Extension Update: March 2005 Archives
Amazingly, the time has come to begin work on our 2007 to 2011 program plan of work. Nancy Franz has put together an initial draft of the plan, based on current program area and work team logic models.
Program Leaders and interdisciplinary team chairs have the draft plan and will work with staff to update it by August 1. Then, from August 1 through January 1, Nancy will share this updated plan with county staff and advisory councils. She will bring the feedback from these sessions to program area and interdisciplinary team meetings in January and February and change the plan accordingly.
During the month of March, she will meet with Program Leaders and interdisciplinary team chairs to cross walk the plan with CSREES problem areas for final submission to CSREES on April 1, 2006. This plan will be available on line so staff can develop program plans for the next plan of work cycle between April 1 and September 30, 2006. You'll hear more about this new electronic system over the next year. Feel free to contact Nancy if you have questions or suggestions for this process.
The PD& E Council met February 9 to evaluate the interdisciplinary teams formed in 2004. The Council collected data from team chairs, campus specialists and informal discussions with other staff.
During the data analysis process, Council members reviewed the UNH Cooperative Extension Strategic Plan as a basis for the purpose and goals of forming interdisciplinary teams. Our strategic plan calls for an “organizational structure that supports both base programs and initiatives addressing critical and emerging needs.” It also calls for the organization to “encourage and support specialists and educators to take the lead in creating multi-disciplinary teams addressing critical and emerging statewide issues.”
Council members carefully considered this plan, current staff morale and our organization’s dedication to high quality, relevant educational programs to meet the needs of people in New Hampshire. Based on these inputs, the Council recommended changes in policy and implementation of interdisciplinary teams to the Leadership Team.
In response to these recommendations, the Leadership Team updated interdisciplinary team policies as follows:
• A definition of interdisciplinary work is provided to staff so Program Leaders and staff have a common understanding of interdisciplinary programming. The Leadership Team agreed on the following definition and rationale for interdisciplinary work.
• Program leaders, in concert with individual staff will determine what interdisciplinary work each Extension Specialist and Educator will engage in using a guideline of 10% of their time (21 days for full time). Staff have several options for meeting this interdisciplinary programming guideline, including:
o Continue working on the interdisciplinary team to which they are assigned
o Request a reassignment to another interdisciplinary team
o Create a new interdisciplinary team with a focus that meets the definition of interdisciplinary work, falls within the mission and vision of UNHCE, and meets the needs of the people in New Hampshire (GAP analysis, demographics, and other data should be used to determine this). Newly proposed teams will be reviewed and approved by the Leadership Team.
o Participate in a new or existing program outside of a team that meets the criteria for interdisciplinary work
o An existing interdisciplinary team may choose to disband. Sufficient evidence must suggest UNHCE is responding to the topic/issue in another manner since these teams were formed based on GAP analysis data.
o There may be circumstances where an educator’s or specialist’s job responsibilities may not include interdisciplinary work for a period of time (new hire, funded by restricted grants, contracts or gifts)
• The Leadership Team supports rewarding interdisciplinary work through the staff recognition plan. Incentives/rewards will be based on documented outcomes/impacts of interdisciplinary work rather than inputs such as time spent on interdisciplinary work. Reduction of an employee’s appointment will not be related to participation with an interdisciplinary team.
• Supervision and documentation of time involved in interdisciplinary work will be the responsibility of Program Leaders, not chairs of interdisciplinary teams. Chairs, like all other Extension staff, will provide performance review feed back on staff they work closely with. They will not be required to provide additional feedback or documentation for their team members.
• A description of interdisciplinary work expectations will be included in all position descriptions for new hires. Search committees will discuss this expectation with candidates.
• The Leadership Team will continue to support for the Program Council. This group of Program Leaders and Chairs/Co-Chairs of interdisciplinary teams is an important and effective way to facilitate communication about programming.
If there are any questions or need for clarification of these changes in policy, feel free to contact members of the Leadership Team.
Congratulations to the Sugar River Rapids 4-H Homeschool Team for winning the 2005 statewide LifeSmarts competition this week. LifeSmarts, sponsored by the NH Jumpstart Coalition, is a consumer knowledge competition designed for high school-aged youth.
The competition’s first stage requires youth to compete online. At the end of the online competition, only six teams with the highest online scores remained for the statewide competition held at Southern New Hampshire University. View the LifeSmarts website to learn more and see photos of the winners.
The winning team, comprised of UNH Cooperative Extension 4-H Educator Nancy Berry, her daughter Allison Berry as assistant coach, and four home-schoolers, Steven Woods, team captain and Isaiah Prever, both from Claremont, Megan McKone, Lempster, and Lexi Sweet, Charlestown, beat five teams for the victory. The other teams competing came from Inter Lakes, John Stark Regional, Mascoma Valley Regional, Newfound Regional and Raymond High Schools.
The Sullivan County 4-H team, in winning the state competition, will now compete at the national LifeSmarts competition in April, 2005, in San Francisco. NH Jumpstart Coalition pays all expenses for the team to go to the competition. There also is a $5,000 Southern New Hampshire University scholarship given to each member of the statewide LifeSmarts team and other prizes.
UNH Cooperative Extension has been an integral partner with the NH Jumpstart Coalition since the coalition’s inception in 2000. At the NH Jump$tart Coalition’s sponsored MoneySmart teacher’s financial literacy conference, UNH Cooperative Extension provided training in implementing the NEFE High School Financial Planning Program the past five years. Consisting of six units, the curriculum uses real-world scenarios to teach teens how to manage their money. In five years, 22,131 New Hampshire students learned about personal finance through NEFE’s High School Financial Planning Program.
The latest issue of the Journal of Extension (JOE) continues to offer excellent resources, including articles on Youth-Led Community Building: Promising Practices from Two Communities Using Community-Based Service-Learning, Building a Collaboration for Youth Development: The "Club-Within-a-Club," and Private Forest Landowners: What They Want in an Educational Program.
JOE expands and updates the research and knowledge base for Extension professionals and other adult educators to improve their effectiveness. In addition, JOE serves as a forum for emerging and contemporary issues affecting Extension education, and the latest issue is no exception!
Parents are under more stress than ever. Mary Pipher, author of Reviving Ophelia, writes in her book, The Shelter of Us, about one of the biggest changes in parenting over the past decades. In the past, it was the parents’ job to socialize children so they were prepared to join the mainstream culture. Today, parents must protect children from the world, and help young people hold on to values that too often conflict with those they encounter in the world. Parenting education changed to reflect this important difference.
In Rockingham County, Karen Blass teaches families how to deal with the influence of marketing and the media on children. The media targets children in many ways, from television characters in their fast food boxes to children’s books produced by for-profit companies. Karen helps parents and kids become more media smart. Through media literacy classes, parents and kids learn to spot commercials and the ways advertisers try to sell them products. Through this work, families learn to define values important to them and reject the media messages that conflict with those values.
In Sullivan County, Gail Kennedy collaborates with Nancy Berry to deliver drug and alcohol prevention education to teens who need this information the most. A grant from the NH Department of Health and Human Services brings Strengthening Families, a model program with proven effectiveness, to Sullivan County youth. Parents learn to recognize signs of drug use and how to communicate with youth. While parents meet, teens meet separately to develop skills to resist drug and alcohol use.
Statewide, UNH Cooperative Extension continues its popular and effective age-paced newsletter series, Cradle Crier and Toddler Tales. Annually, about 5,000 parents receive these newsletters geared to the age of the child (birth through two). Parents consistently report they learn about child development, safety, nutrition and other important parenting skills. The newsletters help parents feel more confident, setting the stage for strong parents throughout childhood.
Extension Specialist Mark Wiley is the recipient of a $75,000 grant from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to fund a New England Sea Grant Aquatic Nuisance Species Outreach proposal. This was an intense competition nationwide with only 5 of 19 proposals funded for a two-year period.
Among the objectives of the grant are the engagement of 250 divers in volunteer marine invasive species monitoring, who will deliver a coordinated dive training program, increase the data available to managers related to the presence, abundance and distribution of a number of target subtidal invasive species, and raise awareness and stewardship activities in the dive community related to marine invasive species.
For more information, contact Mark Wiley at mark.wiley@unh.edu
Do you read a local newspaper?
If you do and you discover an article about UNH Cooperative Extension, bring it in to your county or state office and pop it in the mail to Holly Young at Taylor Hall.
Holly is looking for articles about UNH Cooperative Extension from throughout the state she can forward to UNH Media Relations. This request is only through the end of June. At the county level, the County Office Administrators plan on designating one person to collect the news clippings on a weekly basis.
UNH Media Relations is making a concerted effort to get more stories into statewide newspapers, big and small, and we'd like to share with them the stories already making the papers.
If you have any questions, please contact Holly directly.
To find Cooperative Extension events more quickly on the UNH web site, just click on the calendar link on the UNH site. While we had always been linked in the top left corner of the UNH page, this new format helps showcase our calendar to the UNH community.
The Northeast Consortium, created in 1999, consists of four research institutions (UNH, UMaine, MIT and Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution.) The consortium encourages and funds cooperative research and monitoring projects in the Gulf of Maine and Georges Bank that create effective, equal partnerships among fishermen, scientists, educators and marine resource managers. It administers nearly $5 million annually for cooperative research on a broad range of topics including gear selectivity, fish habitat, stock assessments, and socioeconomics.
Rollie Barnaby, Extension Educator, Marine Resources, was a member of the team that created the consortium. He continues to serve as the project’s outreach coordinator. Every project funded by the consortium needs at least one researcher and one commercial fisherman. One of Rollie’s tasks is to help match fishermen with researchers. He also helps fishermen develop research ideas.
From 1999-2004, the Northeast Consortium funded more than 130 projects, involved over 260 paid and volunteer fishermen and 95 scientists, and ensured completion of over 30 funded projects. Commercial fishermen received more than $7 million in direct payments, which according to a regional economic impact model, produced over $12 million in economic benefits for the fishing and shore side support industries sustaining 140 fishing jobs and more than 55 jobs in onshore support industries.
Of 411 commercial fishermen surveyed in 2003, 88 percent believe cooperative research leads to better fisheries management, 86 percent believe cooperative research improves relationships between fishermen and scientists, and 77 percent believe cooperative research provides economic benefits to fishing communities.