“The true measure of success is to break the abuse cycle, … rather than being held down by the past. Heart & Hope offers families an opportunity to reach for a brighter future.” — Tyler Ingram Elko County District Attorney
We sat down with Woodbury, who coordinates Heart & Hope, to learn more about the program and the team’s experience with NTAE. How has the NTAE grant made a difference in your program this year? It has been truly transformational. We started out looking for support to write a curriculum for young kids and teens and revise promotional material. And then, every time we met with an Extension Foundation Catalyst or Key Informant, we discovered a new way to promote and deliver our ma- terial, too—ways we had not considered or did not have the resources to do on our own. The EXF team supported us in developing well-designed, eye-catching print/digital promotional material. In addi- tion, they helped us write and fine-tune a case statement to share information about our program with stakeholders and potential funders. With their help, we also updated our program website, making it more engaging by using a chatbot to check for program qualification, online forms to streamline the registration process, and a listserv to grow our program partners. We’re delighted to use these new tools to promote Heart & Hope and reach more families as we gear up to expand statewide and nationally. Working with Karl Bradley, the Extension Foundation’s lead- ership specialist, allowed us to develop our leadership skills further and incorporate the components of highly effective teams. The leadership training expanded our capacity to build stronger connections with internal stakeholders, such as our College Communications Team, which is helping us promote the program in ways we had not accomplished in the past. ➤
the Cycle Extension program helps families build resilience after surviving domestic violence.
The Centers for Disease Control reports that one in four children is exposed to domestic violence in their lifetime. Julie Woodbury has met some of these children and their parents. As educators with University of Nevada, Reno Extension, Woodbury and her colleagues founded a program called “Heart & Hope” to provide a safe place for domestic vio- lence survivors to learn skills for creating healthy home en- vironments. Woodbury remembers one mom, in particular,
who had an aha moment during one of the sessions. “The mother said to me, ‘My daughter’s tantrums are not random to make me mad. They may stem from what she experi- enced. Now I want to respond to her tantrums differently.’” When survivors like this mom and her daughter have resources, skills, and support, they are more likely to break the cycle of violence, Woodbury says. That’s the purpose of this research-based program. Since its inception in 2015, Heart & Hope has served 46 families in Elko, Nevada. The program team has big dreams for the future, including scaling Heart & Hope across the state and the nation. So
they applied for a National Technologies for Ag Exten- sion (NTAE) Acceleration grant to connect with Extension experts nationwide who helped them think differently about what program messages to share, with whom, and how in order to reach a wider audience. The team plans to expand to Las Vegas, Nevada’s largest urban center, to learn how the program may benefit diverse groups, including low-income, minority, and LGBTQ fami- lies and hopes to train 10 staff and serve 30 adults and 50 children in the first year.
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EXTENSION FOUNDATION/NTAE | 2022-2023 YEARBOOK
2022-2023 YEARBOOK | EXTENSION FOUNDATION/NTAE
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