Extension Stakeholder Engagement: Adapting to the Twenty-First Century

Over the past 100 years, a number of societal trends have influenced how Cooperative Extension engages public audiences in its outreach and education efforts. These trends include rapid evolution in communication technology, greater specialization of Land-Grant University faculty, and diversification of funding sources. In response, Extension organizations have adapted their engagement approach, incorporated new technologies, modified their organizational structures, and even expanded the notion of public stakeholders to include funders, program nonparticipants, and others. This article explores the implications for future Extension efforts using two case studies—one which explores how a community visioning program incorporated new ways of engaging local audiences, and another which explores how an Extension business retention program used participatory action research and educational organizing approaches to strengthen participation in a research-based program

THE UNIVERSITY'S ALTERNATIVES

Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

The social production of community garden space: Case studies of Boston, Massachusetts and Havana, Cuba

This research incorporates \u27production of space\u27 theory to explore how individual and societal characteristics influence community gardening practices and outcomes for individuals and neighborhoods in Havana, Cuba and Boston, Massachusetts. Methods used for this research include demographic analysis, interviews, surveys, field mapping, photo documentation and direct observation. The hope is that this research will bring to light certain policies and actions that will help ensure access to community garden space by diverse individuals. The following describes the main findings of this research. In Boston, some neighborhoods experiencing rapidly escalating rents are also experiencing an outmigration of ethnic minorities, particularly Hispanic-Latinos and African Americans. As neighborhoods lose their ethnic diversity, so do the community gardens located in these neighborhoods. The consequence is that cultural gardening practices and traditions are lost for gardeners, and often times, for entire neighborhoods. In Havana, Cuba, the growing of food in urban plots helped the country weather the crisis that resulted from the loss of food imports after the collapse of the Soviet Union. During the early 1990s, the number of gardens cultivated by individuals, families, and organized groups in Havana grew into the thousands due to a series of agricultural reforms enacted by the government. In spite, new indications suggest that the government is shifting its focus away from urban agricultural cooperatives towards private gardens

Extension Stakeholder Engagement: An Exploration of Two Cases Exemplifying 21st Century Adaptions

Over the past 100 years, a number of societal trends have influenced how Cooperative Extension engages public audiences in its outreach and education efforts. These trends include rapid evolution in communication technology, greater specialization of Land-Grant University faculty, and diversification of funding sources. In response, Extension organizations have adapted their engagement approach, incorporated new technologies, modified their organizational structures, and even expanded the notion of public stakeholders to include funders, program nonparticipants, and others. This article explores the implications for future Extension efforts using two case studies—one which explores how a community visioning program incorporated new ways of engaging local audiences, and another which explores how an Extension business retention program used participatory action research and educational organizing approaches to strengthen participation in a research-based program

Introduction to Fiscal Impact Analysis

An introduction to fiscal impact analysis. What is FIA? What situations call for a fiscal impact analysis, the pros and cons, how it is performed, and what an FIA will find

AN ECONOMIC ANALYSIS OF POLICIES PROTECTING SMALL BUSINESS IN THE MILK INDUSTRY

Livestock Production/Industries,

From the Political to the Personal:Interrogation, Imprisonment, and Sanction In the Prison Drama of Seamus Byrne and Brendan Behan

In my dissertation, I examine the multi-leveled metaphor of interrogation, imprisonment, and sanction in the 1950s Irish prison dramas of Seamus Byrne\u27s Design For A Headstone and Brendan Behan\u27s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. In these plays, I explore the development of that metaphor and how it relates directly to the prison situation in the Republic of Ireland in the 1950s. During that revolutionary, socially, and politically stagnant decade in Ireland, these two playwrights examine the way that the Irish government adopted similar tactics in its treatment of prisoners as had England when it had ruled the island. Not only does a post-colonial subaltern circumstance exist in the legal and carceral realm, but also these plays show a connection of the Church and state and the implications of such a society on its penal system. In Chapter One, I examine Seamus Byrne\u27s Design For A Headstone. I argue that it is in the naturalistic, representational tradition of Ibsen and that through this direct portrayal of prison life, Byrne captures the irony of life and death struggles within a penal system. I argue that this play is important in the Irish canon of drama, even though Byrne is essentially a forgotten playwright. In Chapters Two and Three, I examine Brendan Behan\u27s The Quare Fellow and The Hostage. I explicate Behan\u27s movement away from representationalism to a form more closely resembling theater of the absurd. In The Quare Fellow he makes subtle movement away from realism, and in The Hostage plunges into a fluid and abstract form. In these plays, Behan satirizes the Irish government as well as that I.R.A