Tracking collaborative efforts in the North Central States

On the biweekly Michigan State University Extension Redesign Web Conference this week, I mentioned several developments from the North Central Cooperative Extension Association (NCCEA) meeting held last week in St. Louis, Missouri, including a forthcoming workshop on grant writing for teams and efforts to develop outcome indicators that measure the broad impacts of Cooperative Extension programming on economic development, citizen engagement, and other community outcomes. I mentioned that I would provide links to the NCCEA web site and the resources there. For example, you can find a link to each of the regional logic models for each program area at the site. And you can find links to the webinar series presented by NCCEA this summer related to region-wide efforts to develop programming related to metropolitan food systems on the NCCEA home page. And the Battelle study on regional opportunities for ag-bio economic development is on the website as well. Dr. Robin Shepard serves as executive director for NCCEA and is a consummate Extension professional himself, with a background in community and natural resources development.