Ten Years of Community Profiles in New Hampshire

Through a program called Community Profiles, the University of New Hampshire Cooperative Extension has helped 57 New Hampshire communities develop a vision for their future and mobilize local residents to act on that vision. The Community Profile process is based on the premise that communities must engage members in identifying and documenting common and deeply held values from which to craft a vision for the future if they are to build and sustain community vitality. The process also helps communities find new and creative ways to pursue that vision by leveraging resources within and outside of the community. These resources include individual skills, local organizational capacity, and local, state, and regional institutional-support structures. Since creating and pursuing a vision is a challenge for communities that often rely on volunteers, the Community Profiles program was conceived to help them achieve these functions. Community Profiles is, in essence, a process that enables community residents to take stock of current conditions, build a collective set of goals for their future, and develop an action plan for realizing that vision. In the past 10 years, UNH Cooperative Extension has helped nearly a quarter of the state’s incorporated cities and towns conduct Community Profiles. This retrospective shares with our stakeholders the various successes that communities have had as a result of the process. This publication was inspired by stories emerging from Community Profiles conducted between 1996 and 2006 in 42 communities. The communities selected for this report were either particularly successful at carrying out the Community Profiles process, or they achieved positive outcomes as a result of the process. Through this report we will tell their stories and illustrate how these and other communities can work together to shape their future through persistence, creativity and teamwork

Building Wealth Through Ownership: Resident-Owned Manufactured Housing Communities in New Hampshire

Eighty-two resident-owned manufactured housing parks serve over 4,000 New Hampshire families. Despite their popularity, one important question remains: do they outperform investor-owned manufactured housing parks from a social and economic standpoint? A research team from UNH set out to answer this question through a comprehensive study that engaged subjects from resident-owned parks and investor-owned parks and officials from seven New Hampshire towns. The research findings suggest that resident-owned manufactured housing parks indeed provide a more affordable housing option for low-income families, as well as an enhanced sense of ownership and an opportunity to build equity. Implications for Extension are discussed

The University of New Hampshire Engaged Scholars Academy: Instilling in Faculty Principles of Effective Partnership

Over the last decade, the University of New Hampshire (UNH) has promoted mutually beneficial partnerships between faculty and community partners vis-à-vis the Engaged Scholars Academy (ESA), a faculty development program aimed at enhancing faculty understanding of the principles of partnership and engaged scholarship. This research seeks to determine whether and how the ESA has impacted faculty-community partnerships around engaged scholarship. Findings suggest that Engaged Scholar Academy participants – as compared to non-participants – have a deeper understanding of the principles of partnership, are more likely to feel their scholarship is enhanced, spend more time with partners, engage their partners throughout the process of inquiry, and focus more on sustaining partnership outcomes

Mechanical modelling quantifies the functional importance of outer tissue layers during root elongation and bending

Root elongation and bending require the coordinated expansion of multiple cells of different types. These processes are regulated by the action of hormones that can target distinct cell layers. We use a mathematical model to characterise the influence of the biomechanical properties of individual cell walls on the properties of the whole tissue. Taking a simple constitutive model at the cell scale which characterises cell walls via yield and extensibility parameters, we derive the analogous tissue-level model to describe elongation and bending. To accurately parameterise the model, we take detailed measurements of cell turgor, cell geometries and wall thicknesses. The model demonstrates how cell properties and shapes contribute to tissue-level extensibility and yield. Exploiting the highly organised structure of the elongation zone (EZ) of the Arabidopsis root, we quantify the contributions of different cell layers, using the measured parameters. We show how distributions of material and geometric properties across the root cross-section contribute to the generation of curvature, and relate the angle of a gravitropic bend to the magnitude and duration of asymmetric wall softening. We quantify the geometric factors which lead to the predominant contribution of the outer cell files in driving root elongation and bending