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.

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 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.

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.

Los hispanos son el grupo minoritario más grande de Estados Unidos, y en una encuesta del Pew Research Center en 2016, los votantes latinos clasificaron la educación como una de sus principales prioridades (Pew Research Center, 2016). Este eFieldbook presenta un programa nacido en Extensión que se centra en una población creciente en Carolina del Norte y que hoy es una iniciativa nacional. El Programa Juntos adopta un enfoque centrado en las fortalezas y en "la familia" para diseñar los servicios y definir los parámetros de éxito. En 2007, el equipo de Juntos encuestó a las comunidades Latinxs de Carolina del Norte para determinar sobre qué tema querían saber más y qué recursos necesitaban. Al igual que el estudio de Pew Research, casi diez años después, nuestra encuesta reveló que la prioridad número uno de los latinos era entender y aprender a desenvolverse en los sistemas escolares de Estados Unidos para que sus jóvenes pudieran alcanzar sus objetivos académicos.

“Bridging the Gaps: Approaches to Treating Water on Farms” is a curriculum designed to help producers understand and address the regulatory requirements for ag water treatment in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA).

Preventing foodborne illness and protecting public health are critically important to producers. Sanitary irrigation water is also mandated by the USDA; producers are required to monitor, treat, and verify compliance. This curriculum, developed by a multi-state, interdisciplinary team of public and private sector experts, focuses on helping producers accomplish key goals, including:

• Understanding the regulatory requirements for ag water treatment in the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA);

• Finding the right water treatment system for their farm;
• Developing standard operating procedures; and
• Ensuring that the proper system is implemented correctly.

In 2012 ECOP created a national task force on health to identify systemwide priorities. This group produced a National Framework for Health and Wellness, approved by ECOP in 2014. In 2020, ECOP recognized the need to update guidance in this area and appointed a Health Innovation Task Force to provide recommendations for system-level change to further advance Cooperative Extension’s work in the area of health. Those recommendations are included in this document.