National Program Leader, Toija Riggins, discusses evaluation and reporting trends. Toija Riggins, Ph.D. serves as National Program Leader – Division of Family and Consumer Sciences Rural Sociology, Behavioral Economics & Impact Measurement, USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture.
Dr. Toija Riggins serves as the National Program Leader in Rural Sociology, Behavioral Economics & Impact Measurement in the Division of Family & Consumer Sciences at the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. In this role, she works with administrators, faculty and Extension educators across the Land-Grant University system, as well as with Federal agencies and other partners. She collaborates to identify existing and emerging social science research, performance measurement, and evidence-based programming needs, opportunities, and resources. Her areas of focus include rural-urban interdependence and prosperity, data science, financial decision-making, risk management, and diversity. Toija leads and manages two competitive grants programs at NIFA: Agriculture Risk Management Education (ARME) and Farm Business Management and Benchmarking (FBMB). She works closely with NIFA’s Planning, Accountability and Reporting Staff (PARS) and also serves as a NIFA liaison to: Land Grant Universities in the state of Georgia (University of Georgia and Fort Valley State University); Experiment Station Committee on Organization and Policy’s (ESCOP) Social Science Sub-Committee; the Extension Financial Security for All Community of Practice; the Cooperative Extension Rural Broadband Working Group; and to the federal Financial Literacy and Education Commission (FLEC). She is a member of NIFA’s Diversity & Inclusion Committee. Toija previously served NIFA as National Program Leader in USDA’s 4-H Youth Development Program. Prior to joining NIFA, she worked as an evaluator at USDA’s Food and Nutrition Service, Director of the Core Curriculum Program at the NYC Department of Education, and as Research and Evaluation Manager at the Girl Scouts of the USA in New York, NY. Toija has a B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. in Social Psychology and Psychometrics from University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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