Our Story -- Engaging Others and Creating Our Forum Agenda For both the 2018-2019 and 2021 forums, the planning timeline was driven by the funding sources which allowed for one year to plan and implement the forums. More or somewhat less time could certainly be used depending on your team, the issue, and the type of forum you are trying to plan.
Delaware 2018 Forum
The forum agenda evolved after reviewing the literature and realizing that many of our Extension colleagues and community partners were not aware of the breadth of the issue both in terms of content but also in terms of the levels of impact at each sector of the socio- ecological model. For example, many of our agriculture colleagues understood that farms and farm finances were stressors and that these were causing distress among the farming community as well as impacted farm families. Our Family and Consumer Science colleagues understood that the well-being of farmers had an impact on the well-being of the rest of the family. Our financial management colleagues understood that financial stress and access to health insurance was impacting both individual and family abilities to get and pay for health care. Individually, our colleagues were doing the best they could to understand and address the issues and work with their clientele. But few were talking with each other or the greater community; they were not using a sociological model approach to build sustainable strategies. Engaging community members in conversations through interviews (2018-2019) and a focus group (2021) helped us learn about what our participants’ percept ions were, their issues of concern for the farming population and how they framed those issues. For example, in talking to a secretary of health and human services, her comment was: “I had no idea that farm populations were such a “vulnerable population.” Further discussion helped our team
understand that was a term used by state health officials to identify certain population segments to which state resources could be focused. For both forum initiatives, a small group of Extension professionals were involved in applying for the grant. In 2017 the team sought funding from the Northeast programming backgrounds – Agriculture, Sustainable Agriculture, Farm Management and Risk Management and from Family and Consumer Science -- Health and Personal Finance. For this forum, we conducted one
Vermont 2016 Summit
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