An extensive faculty partnership at the University of Connecticut (UConn) that reaches across college and departmental lines is engaged in a project that seeks to enhance, expand, institutionalize, and study a new model for community engagement. The model, called the Environment Corps (E-Corps), combines the familiar elements of classroom…

Engaged scholarship (ES) entails a symbiotic relationship between the community and the university. This article reports results from an evaluation of an ES symposium Eastern Carolina University held to increase awareness of ES as a means for integrating research, teaching, and service and to potentially change unfavorable perceptions about ES…

The University of Missouri Extension needed to develop an annual program review process that collaboratively engaged county-level stakeholders. The results from the first 2 years highlight the results, challenges, and implications of the design process. The annual review process needs to be adaptive, responsive, and reflective from year to year…

Personal food system mapping is a practical means to engage community participants and educators in individualized and shared learning about food systems, decisions, and behaviors. Moreover, it is a useful approach for introducing the food system concept, which is somewhat abstract. We developed the approach to capture diversity of personal food…

The income tax-filing process creates teachable moments for learning about taxes and other financial matters. Educators and volunteers from Penn State Cooperative Extension helped taxpayers file 2008 returns under Volunteer Income Tax Assistance Program (VITA). Nearly 600 filers (588) completed and simultaneously received educational information…

Extension continuously seeks novel and effective approaches to outreach and education. The recent retirement of a longtime content specialist catalyzed members of University of Minnesota Extension's Forestry team to reflect on our instructional capacity (internal and external) and educational design in the realm of maple syrup production. We…

Twenty-seven five-year-olds walk into kindergarten on the first day of school in southeastern Kentucky. On average, nine of those children live in poverty, two were born to mothers who did not complete high school, two were removed from their homes because of abuse or neglect, and fourteen are from single-parent homes: this according to statistics…

The University of Minnesota Extension conducted a social network analysis (SNA) to examine its outreach to organizations external to the University of Minnesota. The study found that its outreach network was both broad in its reach and strong in its connections. The study found that SNA offers a unique method for describing and measuring Extension…

Tennessee State University has a rich history of public service and civic engagement--thus the motto "Think, Work, Serve." Founded in 1912, Tennessee State University has grown dramatically from a small college to two campuses. We actively engage in adhering to the cornerstone of the land-grant universities: teaching, research, and outreach. Our…

In the current Overseas Contingency Operation (OCO), families and communities have been impacted by multiple deployments. This is particularly challenging for families that are geographically isolated from military installations and resources typically available near these facilities. Operation Military Kids (OMK) is a national partnership…

University managers of academic outreach need outstanding skills in communication, persuasion, and negotiation to win and maintain active faculty/administrator support for outreach activities. Failure to generate such support will make it impossible for outreach managers to deliver on the promise of the outreach concept. (Editor/LBH)

Outreach has recently played an increasingly significant role in education and training for adults. In particular, the emphasis of Great Britain's REPLAN program on increasing the participation of unemployed adults in education and the impact of decreasing numbers of 16- to 19-year-old students in some colleges of further education have given…

A survey was conducted to explore the potential of weekly newspapers for information dissemination in rural Saskatchewan. Articles about engineering research of relevance to the community had been mailed to eighty weekly Canadian newspapers on a free-choice basis over a ten month period. A random sample of 1,020 subscribers selected from the…

The National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges' Kellogg Commission notes the perception that "despite the resources and expertise available on our campuses, our institutions are not well organized to bring them to bear on local problems in a coherent way." This article suggests some organizational patterns and…

Historically, land-grant university research stations focused on demonstrating successful farming methods. The land-grant mission and the principles at its foundation have broad applicability, and we believe the land-grant principles can be successfully applied in urban settings to a university's work with youth and families. In this article we…