“The Coming Storm” Photo by NOAA at Unsplash.
Extension Roles & Leadership Styles Authentic Community Engagement & Participatory Processes
Extension C/EW early adopters strive to: ‘meet people where they are at’, engage audiences and clientele in authentic and mutually beneficial ways, and create safe and productive spaces for facilitating participatory decision making. Employing these leadership traits and laying this foundation during the earliest phases of work proves critical for long-term programmatic success, especially given the widespread politicization of climate science and issues that respondents have encountered (described later in this section). ● “ Extension’s history really is that it's a bit slower moving and a little more grounded and very relational . And I think that that's typically what I've seen, it's worked for me and it's worked for other people that I've seen in Extension here . That's successful. I think it's harder when you come out of the gate hard with an idea that you think everybody needs to know about and they're not ready for it or they're not interested in it either.” (R04) ● “We have people with the city who are very involved in developing this [Extension program] for them. So, it's great to have them actually collaborating with us in terms of what they want for their residents … to get stakeholder involvement and then to be able to get some of [them] collaborating and working with us on the project ... being able to work with large groups of people who have similar goals can be quite powerful. ” (R05) ● “One of the unmet needs is how can you meet people where they are, where their experience is, and help them work through this , understand it, and develop some techniques, develop some programs that can help them deal with that, mitigate those things in the future. We do ...visioning sessions throughout the community and we've done this in cities and villages and townships, and we try to invite as many different, diverse people in, or to provide input, as we possibly can .” (R15)
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