With additional resources and new partnerships, Cooperative Extension can lead efforts in connecting key community support organizations to truly take advantage of the education, resources, and opportunities within each community. Through its mission, Cooperative Extension is equipped to deliver a 360-degree approach that would allow for inclusion of education for youth and families to assist in creating economically viable and sustainable communities. Extension Educators are taking both systems-driven and audience-driven approaches to supporting economic and workforce development. Extension programs serve youth audiences, adult audiences, new populations, and vulnerable populations. Overall Goal: Through NIFA funding support, the Workforce Development Program Action Team (WDPAT), a sub- committee of the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy, would conduct a system-wide tracking and registration of Workforce Development program offerings. Workforce development affects all communities and ethnic groups, and often those in the most underserved communities are impacted the most severely. The WDPAT in will develop an extensive and dynamic assessment tool that will provide a usable dataset on current WD programming; and provide data that can be used to identify gaps, opportunities, and successes in programming. Collecting this data is critical for Extension’s success in workforce development enabling the organization to identify and scale existing workforce development programs across all aspects of Cooperative Extension. Specific Objectives: Internal Assessment (extension.org/registry) Funds will buy out time of a faculty member to promote, socialize, and incentivize participation in the tracking tool. The tool will include questions that will help inform future strategy around WD expansion, prioritization, and partnership development. Approach: In consultation with the WDPAT, the faculty lead for this project will work with the Extension Foundation to develop an extensive and dynamic tool to capture current workforce development efforts in Cooperative Extension. Once developed, the assessment tool will be promoted to state program leaders across Extension’s knowledge areas - Agriculture, Family and Consumer Sciences, 4-H Youth Development, and Community Economic Development. To help socialize and incentivize participation across all Extension knowledge areas, a team of four fellows, one from each of Extension’s knowledge areas, will work closely with the faculty lead. It is anticipated that the knowledge area fellows will promote registration through outreach/contacts with state program leaders, marketing through professional associations, and presentations/workshops. Potential Impact and Expected Outcomes: The tracking and asset registry will be instrumental in helping to benchmark current workforce development efforts that are being implemented by Cooperative Extension. Such information will be valuable for helping to identify programming gaps, scale existing workforce programs, and better position the WDPAT for pursuing external funding.
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