Publications

One in 10 people in the US lives with diabetes, the seventh leading cause of premature death in the country. It's estimated that nearly 100 million American adults have prediabetes - nearly one in three people.

Addressing this public health crisis is the driving force behind an online toolkit developed by a team of Extension professionals across the country. They aim to help Extension professionals launch a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention-recognized Diabetes Prevention Program (DPP) easily and quickly.

A team from the University of Minnesota (UMN) Extension is creating the Watershed Engagement Programming (WEP) Hub to support watershed-related outreach and engagement efforts to help address the state’s efforts to improve water quality. The team decided to create the Hub after surveying several dozen soil and water conservationists about the challenges they are encountering.

The Hub, still under development, will contain a library of resources and tools that will help soil and water conservation districts (SWCDs), watershed districts (WDs), and other local government and environmental entities create powerful and effective outreach, engagement, and education programs. The Hub will link to and highlight existing materials from a variety of sources and will contain new resources that have been created based on the results of the needs assessment and iterative feedback from the WEP advisory team and its target audience.

The team is implementing best practices for building a clearinghouse. They are considering online platform selection, web development, digital accessibility, and copyright and material ownership issues.

This case study details the efforts of a University of New Hampshire team to develop The Engagement Hub, an innovative, personalized online hub for students, educators, alumni, and community members. The hub aims to create a community of lifelong learners and equip the workforce with knowledge and skills to gain a competitive advantage and adapt to future demands.

This publication serves the dual purpose of explaining the necessity of mental and behavioral health services for farmers and rural communities and identifies the challenges in coordinating complex programming and implementation of services.

In response to the higher rates of suicide among farmers and the limited access to healthcare and mental health services, the Farm and Ranch Stress Assistance Network (FRSAN) was developed to address the rising mental health crisis in farming communities. The NexGen Program analysis creates a framework that helps to determine the most efficacious mental health intervention programs, packages the suite of tools together, and promotes the adoption of improved programs to meet the unique needs of agricultural producers and their allies. Missouri’s FRSAN evaluation program uses a continuous improvement evaluation approach, implementing an educational decision-oriented model to identify strengths and limitations in curricula, instruction, and delivery.

Unique to this approach is the use of digital dashboards to streamline and define processes that create a simple path forward to support large multidisciplinary teams and multiple mental health training programs.

The Menominee Indigenous food system initiative is a collaborative project between the 1994 College of Menominee and UW Madison Extension programs. This publication shares information and resources about Menominee food sovereignty projects, programs, and activities. The publication provides information about assessment; strategies for collaboration, outreach, and communications; case studies; cultural considerations; and resources.

Extension Foundation’s Impact Collaborative is a methodology that helps Cooperative Extension projects, programs, and initiatives to be innovative and community-engaged efforts that result in measurable and visible local impact. Whether your team is looking to improve an existing program or expand its reach to new audiences, possibly through the use of new technologies, or seeks to establish new services or spark the creation of new businesses, the Impact Collaborative process, engagements, and activities provide project teams with tools to develop innovative, community-based approaches to problem-solving. This publication provides context and guidance on community engagement and team building using the Impact Collaborative methodology.

This publication originally appeared as a website with curated and original content contributed by Extension professionals from around the country. The emergence of COVID-19 has required Cooperative Extension professionals to respond quickly to quickly changing needs. This publication provides timely content that we hope will help Cooperative Extension professionals consider the role of digital communications in our work, and perhaps increase our adoption of technology. The information in the publication provides both food for thought in perspective pieces, and practical information about specific social media platforms, SEO, and content strategy that will enable the reader to apply what they've learned and to take action.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recommends rapid implementation of climate adaptation and mitigation programs to reduce the chance of increasingly catastrophic climate change impacts. Cooperative Extension is one outlet for rapid program implementation. This report - generated by a multi-state team in response to an Extension Foundation RFP - contains a national inventory of CES programs and practices in the area of climate and extreme weather and offers insight for Extension educators and upper administration regarding successes, challenges, and gaps in C/EW programming. Programs included align with Project Drawdown, other frameworks, and generally accepted conservation practices.

The Resilient Agriculture: Weather Ready Farms publication was created to help the agricultural industry become more resilient to weather extremes, climate variability and climate change. It is based on the Weather Ready Farms model developed by Nebraska Extension. The focus is primarily on field crop farms and producers in the Great Plains and Midwest regions of the United States. Many of the concepts and discussions within this publication can be utilized and adapted for other regions and agricultural operations.

In 2018 Utah State University Extension launched the Rural Online Initiative (ROI), a training and certification program that teaches people how to become effective remote workers and find remote jobs. ROI is moving the needle: In the last four years, more than 300 rural residents across 21 counties have found work after completing the Master Remote Work Professional (MWRP) certificate course. The ROI team believes the program is on track to help another 400 MWRP graduates find work in 2022.

Urban Extension is growing. This publication is a story of Urban Extension: what it is, how it works, and what it is becoming. This publication includes information about its particular characteristics of diversity and population shift and lays out its differences and similarities to Rural Extension. The publication also includes case studies and a robust resource section.

The Extension Opioid Crisis Response Workgroup (EOCRW) was given a charge from the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy (ECOP) to identify and assemble resources to help Extension play a stronger and more strategic role in addressing the opioid crisis, and more generally behavioral health challenges that emerge over time. This publication provides useful information to help the Land Grant Extension system play a larger role in helping to address the crisis.

This resource provides information about:

• EOCRW
• the findings of a nationwide survey of Extension Behavioral Health programming
• an extensive literature review on opioids and substance abuse
• links to potential partners, networks, and grant opportunities
• and the Extension Opioid Response Strategic Plan Report.