University Place  Richard Klemme The Centennial and Future of Cooperative Extension  February 19, 2014 UP983   cc >> Welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. I'm Tom Zinnen. I work here at the UW Madison Biotechnology Center. I also work for UW Extension Cooperative Extension, and on behalf of those folks and our other co-organizers, Wisconsin Public Television, the Wisconsin Alumni Association, and the UW Madison Science Alliance, thanks again for coming to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. We do this every Wednesday night, 50 times a year. Tonight it's my pleasure to be able to introduce to you Dean Rick Klemme. He's the dean of Cooperative Extension which is part of UW Extension, and we're here to celebrate and commemorate the Smith-Lever Act which was signed into law in 1914. And what I think you'll appreciate about this is I think Rick's going to talk at least as much about the future as he does about the past. And that's a good thing for me in celebrating milestones because it's one thing to look back but it's even a better thing to look forward. Would you please join me in welcoming Rick Klemme to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. 

[APPLAUSE]  >> Well, thank you and welcome to Wednesday Nite at the Lab. Here and the other speakers coming on board is we're kind of giving you the other side of the university tonight, a more practical user-based part of the university, with our connections to the people of that state, all over the state as I'll describe as we go along. A little background on myself. I started in 1980 here at the UW Madison as an agricultural economist. Our building is right next door in what is 427 Lorch Street as an agricultural and applied economics department now. I served there for about nine years, and then directed the sustainable ag center on campus, Center for Integrated Ag Systems, until about the year 2000 and took over the leadership of our agricultural extension programming. I'll explain more about that as we go. Then in 2007 I dived into the depths of administration by becoming dean and director of Cooperative Extension. We'll talk about what that means. I'd like to ask a question of how many people have heard of UW Extension? Good. 

Every single person except Bruce Johnson. No, he's heard of us as well. [LAUGHTER] We appreciate having the opportunity to be taped tonight. We'll be on University Place and hopefully we'll be able to use that in some of our work with advocacy groups around the state. As it says, I'm dean and director of Cooperative Extension for University of Wisconsin Extension, and as we go through tonight, we'll try to explain to you as best I can what Extension, what this beast is. What is Extension? As you can see, it's part of the University of Wisconsin System. University of Wisconsin Extension. It is the only institution like it in the country. Every other state's extension services tend to be located in the agricultural college or perhaps in the chancellor's or president's office on the land-grant campus. We are fortunate, of course, to have a long relationship with the UW Madison. 

That relationship started maybe in a rocky road when UW System was established back in the mid-'70s and this institution called the University of Wisconsin Extension sort of emerged from that system development and had us located in Cooperative Extension in there. Broadcast and Media Innovations. You know what that is. That houses Wisconsin Public Television, Wisconsin Public Radio, and Instructional Communication Services. Division of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development. If you've heard of small business development centers on many of our campuses, that is part of that division. And then we have continuing education, outreach, and learning best known most recently for the flex program. They are partnering with many of the campuses in UW System in that particular program. As Tom indicated, the Smith-Lever Act of 1914 was one of several acts which built and expanded the land-grant system of universities in the country. The Morrill Act of 1862, as Tom indicated, was the act that essentially gave states land which they could sell, use the proceeds to establish public universities. 

And the irony of all that in Wisconsin is that land was actually land that was in a tribal nation, which makes it interesting when we are partnering with the College of Menominee Nation which is also a land-grant institution under the 1994 legislation which established that community land-grant systems. And it turns out my counterpart at the College of Menominee Nation, his ancestors were on the land that was given to the state of Wisconsin taken away from. So you can imagine we had some relationship building to do when we started working together. So in 1890s we had the second Morrill Act, which established the 1890s institutions, which are historically black institutions, mostly in the southern part of the country. 1994 established the land-grant status for the Native American universities coming out of those institutions around the country which we have two in the state. We're pretty extensive. We're everywhere I would say from a management point of view, as being dean and director of having offices located in 72 counties, having offices on three tribal nations, having partnerships with six of the campuses, Madison is the biggest of those partnerships, it creates an interesting environment to manage in because we have virtually, if you count the departments on campus, probably a hundred different sort of mini locations for Extension around the state. Our 72 county offices started to get established in 1912. We actually celebrated our centennial two years ago in 2012 because I believe, and our organization believes, that when a county established the Extension service, that was more important than recognizing the national establishment of support for Cooperative Extension offices because we are very much geared towards working in counties across the state. It's very county centric. 

Our faculty, and we do have faculty in these counties ranging from three to four to five depending on the county, are very responsive to local issues and then rely on the relationships with these campuses that you can see here in terms of being able to bring that research based information to the educational programming. And we'll talk a lot more about that as the hour proceeds. Oops, that was a mistake. Never do that. How are we divided? We have four regions in the state. We have regional directors in each region. They manage anywhere between 17 and 21 counties a piece. We have over 500 educators located across the state in these county offices. The counties provide a significant amount of funding locally. Our relationship with counties is geared around what we call a 60/40 relationship. 

That is, we provide 60% of the faculty salary and fringe benefits; the county provides the other 40% on a contract for services with us and provides clerical support, office space, and office supplies and travel and so forth. So this partnership has been a very strong one for us. When you look at our entire budget, which is approximately $75 million, 28% of that comes from counties. Counties are actually contributing between $150,000 and $250,000 per year towards their Extension offices. If you knew the shape of some of the counties in Wisconsin financially, particularly rural counties, that's an amazing investment, and we pay a lot of attention to that and we make sure that we are being responsive to those issues and providing them with a strong return on investment. Because it turns out the statutory language which established Extension offices in Wisconsin states that, and that's statute 59.03, that each county may have an Extension office, not shall have, not will have, not must have, may have. And when we negotiated our 60/40 partnerships 20 or 30 years ago when county budgets were fairly stable, we needed to get the counties up to 40%, so in negotiations you have to give something. What did we give? We gave a 60-day out clause that we have to with every county in the state which says with 60 days notice they can eliminate the Extension office or any part of that office. We have tenured faculty members in these counties, and if they eliminate a position, we get them. We may get them in other counties and so forth and we've only had three in the seven years that I've been in my position, and when you consider we have 250 faculty times 10, 2500 opportunities, three times that actually has been exercised, I think that's a sign of success for us that we're able to negotiate positive relationships with these county governments. 

And you can see how those are distributed around the state. It's very interesting because you can see the east metro in the blue to the right on the screen in front of you. You see that that is obviously a metro region. That also has some rural counties in it. We have other regions that are much more rural in nature. We are actively engaged in both rural and urban communities in our Extension programming. The legacy we have is agriculture, 4-H, and what at the time was called home economics. Legacies are a wonderful thing for us. Legacies give us something to build on. Legacies also form perceptions of who we are. 

And we're a whole lot more than those legacy programs. Yes we still do agricultural programming. Yes we still have 4-H. It's big in this state, and they're celebrating their centennial this year. Yes we do still sort of do home economics programs, but we've expanded our programming with families to be involved in various programs that I'll talk about as we go through here. The only way survive locally, in fact the only way we survive in the state and nationally, because we are part of a nationwide network of Cooperative Extension offices, is to be relevant and, for an institution as best we can, nimble and flexible in bringing resources the issues that are important to the counties. The implication to that is that our county programs actually look different from county to county. Issues are different. The political landscape is different. The capacity is different. 

The work we do in Milwaukee County is much different than what we do in Jackson County or Crawford or in Marinette, where in those smaller counties we're kind of the only game in town with respect to having that sort of academic presence and that connection to the University of Wisconsin. In Milwaukee County, we're one of literally hundreds if not thousands of players who are engaged in some type of work in the community. So it changes the entire nature of what we look like in Milwaukee County versus a more rural county. Our purpose statement is about four verbs. We're an education institution. Extension is about education. It's education to adults, education to youth, education to people that are involved in farms, communities, organizations, nonprofits, government agencies. Teaching is important to us. And the metrics to us are really there to figure out what difference are we making in our teaching. We're learners. 

You don't evolve a program over time without having your staff able to learn. Learn about new content. And if you're an agricultural agent in Extension in Wisconsin, you've had a lot to learn over the last two, three, four decades in terms of new technologies, new techniques and so forth We're all leaders. I remind our colleagues across the state that leaders are we, that we lead. Whether it's leading a group of adult volunteers who work in our 4-H program, and it turns out that those adults actually are the most important students of our 4-H program. Think about that. 4-H is about youth, ages, roughly, six through 16 or so, and yet our most important students are the adults who work with the community clubs who leverage the investment we have in our educator in a given county. And sometimes it's a surprise to our educators to find out that 4-H is as much about adult education as any other program area that we have. And we serve. We are there, we are embedded in those communities. 

The good news is we're embedded in the communities, which means that we have a pretty good pulse in what's happening in those communities. We have a pretty good pulse of the politics. We have a pretty good pulse of how to connect with the right people to get things done. The bad news about being embedded in a community is that you're embedded in a community 24/7. I knew there are some educators who actually occasionally do their retail shopping out of county, so they don't get located or approached in the local grocery store or the hardware store and asked questions about their work. So that's a very powerful piece for us because that also means that we respect local knowledge and we connect it with the knowledge from this institution and other institutions in the University of Wisconsin System. So it's really trying to be the best of both worlds. We talked about being part of the community. We believe it's important for us to be accessible, trusted, respected, and offer unbiased research. I'm going to catch up on my notes here. 

As part of the community, I mentioned that being embedded in a community gives us a real opportunity to develop educational curriculum that fits, and it fits different learners, different styles. Obviously that's a generational issue now. That's an issue of cross-cultural work as we work with increasing populations of Latinos, Hmong, Somalis in a couple counties in the northwest part of the state, of course African Americans in urban settings, that those curriculum need to be developed with those cultures in mind and delivered in ways that are appropriate for the learning styles that we look at. Even within a given population there is a blend of learning styles. Most interesting of that for me was about 25 years ago or so I got involved in working with dairy farmers who grazed their dairy cattle. And ordinarily, up until the mid-'80s or so, I guess that makes it about 30 years ago doesn't it, we were sort of traditional podium speakers, workshops, people come to a central location, we bring people in from Madison, they talk about their research. And we still do that, but in grazing operations, because it's kind of a holistic management technique, our educational role turned into facilitative learning. That is, we engage dairy farmers on somebody's farm, and that farmer provided a context for that learning environment, and we and the grazers contributed to the mutual learning that happened on those farms. That was a big change for us. That began, in a way it continued to process but I thought it was a big step in changing us from disseminators to educators to leaders of people learning and learning with them because frankly some of our county educators, maybe many of our county educators, knew less about grazing than the farmers did. 

And so it takes guts to abandon your expert model role and to get into an environment like that. We'll talk about some other kinds of examples like that as we move through this presentation. Accessibility is important for us in all kinds of ways. Having access to our programs means that that's access to all of the community. And that means different ways of reaching people than we're used to reaching. It's not a traditional media announcement of a program. It may be that we're actually going to Catholic churches in rural communities to engage people of the Latino community. It may be that we can't go to the chamber necessarily to reach Latino business owners. It may be that we have to have conversations with clan chiefs in Hmong communities in Wausau and Eau Claire to actually get permission to do educational programs. That's actually been useful for us and how we're engaging Native American tribes in Wisconsin, which there are 11 of those. 

Trusted, that's our currency. We don't have trust, we're not seen as a viable partner, we're not seen as an unbiased provider of information, we're not seen as somebody we can come in and facilitate contentious conversations. That's our currency. That's the reason we exist and strive in those situations. We need to be respected. We're respected in some ways in many cases, although that's shaky these days sometimes about being affiliated with the University of Wisconsin. It is still a place to start from respect. And you build respect by building partnerships and appreciating the values and the knowledge that people in the community bring to the conversations. That's probably the quickest way to respect. The name badge is fine. 

Building those relationships is ultimately the way to get that done. And clearly, being able to offer unbiased research, whether it's in the area of biotechnology, and as Tom Zinnen has indicated before is an Extension specialist specializing in that for quite a few years. You're pushing 25? Years I mean, not age. [LAUGHTER] [INAUDIBLE] You got at least a one in front of that, Tom. I know better than that. And being able to bring research and to participate in that research ourselves as county faculty members has been important. And lately, being relying on evidence-based research where we actually do research on evaluation of our educational programming, learn from it, improve it, and deliver evidence-based programs that complement the university research programs that are core to the work on this campus and the others that I talked about earlier in my presentation. Our values mirror our programming. We've been, so those of you who may have jaundiced views or maybe historic views of what strategic planning is and what it's not, we have been in a strategic planning process in Cooperative Extension since 2006. And people have come, our colleagues have stopped rolling their eyes quite so much when we talk about that. 

Strategic planning is a living process. And a strategic plan that we would have written in 2007 wouldn't have worked in 2010, wouldn't have worked in 2013, so we're constantly refining where we are and who we are as an organization and how we work in communities and how we partner with the campuses and how we partner with organizations statewide and locally. So we developed a purpose statement that you saw the verbs of, teach, lead, learn, and serve, connecting the people of Wisconsin with the University of Wisconsin to transform lives and communities. Transformation is important to us. Just doing education to increase awareness and knowledge, while that has some value, if it's not utilized, it's a little frustrating that you don't have people picking up the kinds of educational programming that we offer and actually doing something with it. Transforming lives, organizations, and communities. Our vision state is to be thriving, well known, and sought out. It's an educational resource that reflects the rich diversity of Wisconsin. It kind of scares our colleagues out in the counties who are already overbooked and fully employed to say that we want to be sought out. If you're not sought out and you're not evolving you programs, you're not going to be thriving for very long. 

And so that's really important to us. And thriving in this economic environment is a challenge for us as it is for any public institution. We do have, of course, the three pillars of funding. I've talked about the county funding. Tom alluded to the Smith-Lever funding which provides about 13% of our total budget. The state provides roughly 40% of our total budget. And program revenue, I don't know if my math is quite right, we have other federal grants for another 12%, and then program revenue does whatever is left to get us to 100%. It's about 9% or 10%, which has been growing slowly over time. We believe as a, we are a public goods institution. We do public goods education. 

We don't technically, we don't usually charge for our work. County residents have paid three times for our programs, right? They pay local property taxes, they pay state income taxes, and they pay federal income taxes, and it seems to us, unless we need to provide materials to support a program, charging people for core programming doesn't seem quite fair when they've already paid three times. And so it's important for us to be that public institution, and public funding really matters to us. A research-based institution like this one here at UW Madison can over time evolve toward having less and less public funding. We absolutely need it, and we spend a lot of time helping people understand a return on investment, whether it's a county executive in Winnebago County, an administrator coordinator in Sauk County, a county board chair in Pierce County, or it's somebody in a representative's office, or it's Representative Ribble, Senator Johnson, Representative Pocan. We constantly make that case. The values mirror our programming. Now, these values, sometimes our colleagues object somewhat to these values, and then I remind them. When we did this process, we engaged over 700 of our colleagues, and we have about a thousand colleagues around the state and on campuses who have some percentage of Extension funding We engaged over 700 of them, and we discovered from their work these values. So to assume that somehow we're trying to change their work by imposing values, the reality is the values came from the work. 

Let's talk about them and use some examples along the way. Community. I talked about the importance of being in a community. The 4-H program is our youth education program. It is an intensive program. There are youth all over the state, roughly 35,000 of them, who are engaged in community clubs. They meet frequently. They form bonds. They do public service. They have projects they do at local and state fairs. 

Interestingly enough, the top enrollment for individual projects in 4-H, you might think livestock, maybe crops. It's communication and arts. Our 4-H programs are designed to help 4-H youth build leadership skills in what they want to do, and then we build an adult volunteer workforce to help them do that. And we'll talk about STEM, science, technology, engineering, and math and robotics, a little bit later on as one of our new entries into what we're doing there. We have 17,000 4-H volunteers. We are a people heavy organization. These 17,000 volunteers head, they lead these local clubs. Now, we have about 70 educators in the state and there are 35,000 kids and there's 1300 clubs. One individual can't manage 20 clubs in a county. One individual can, however, work with the leaders of those clubs to ensure good leadership within those clubs which includes the adults and the youth that are involved in them. 

It's not just 4-H that we work in. We actually have over 350,000 youth that are part of educational programs during the course of the year. So while 4-H is a legacy program and it's a very intensive experience, we have a lot of contacts of youth in middle schools, grade schools, in fact our nutrition education programs that I'll get to in a while reach a lot of youth as well. So again, evolution. Back when 4-H started in 1914 in Walworth County, that's probably something you could stump your friends with, not many people know the county that was the original county in Wisconsin, it was really about agriculture and boys growing crops and yield contests. And actually the motivation for that was to get their fathers to change their cropping practices by having their youth engaged. And that's where we started in Walworth County in 1914. Clearly a lot of evolution. Now we have projects that are involved in robotics. We have made robotics shows. 

We have all kinds of kids that are engaged in STEM programs, particularly in those school districts that are involved in Project Lead the Way engineering programs that connect to our engineering programs here at Madison, at Platteville, at MSOE, and at Marquette. So community is really important to us in many different ways. Local food systems, farmers markets, community supported agriculture is another form of evolution for, obviously we weren't doing this 30 years ago. Local agriculture is just getting its feet and its legs going in the 1980s, and some of the work I did at the Center for Integrated Ag Systems we got engaged with local food systems in the early '90s. That's an important part of what we do. We're engaged in community. We do a lot of work with downtowns. With the evolution of big box stores has left some smaller communities, downtowns, in some tough shape. And we'll talk about Mercer, the town of Mercer in a little bit. That they're sort of working their way through the mining experience about 20-30 years ago has forced them into some different strategies. 

So our community programs, we work with local businesses. Lately we've actually started to engage businesses themselves in terms of the skill sets they need to grow their businesses. I think you may have heard over the last five or six years that creating jobs is important. Maybe a few politicians had said that on kind of a regular basis. Or developing businesses and so forth. Well, job creation grows best not really in new businesses because there's high failure rates. It's in stage two businesses that are in that eight to a hundred employee range that are growing their businesses. We started focusing more of our work in working with those businesses to help identify the kinds of managerial needs, whether it's marketing or finance or personnel, they need and am connecting them to those resources. That's new territory for us. And that's something we've started doing in Waukesha County in particular. 

Jerry and Steve, a couple of our faculty in academic staff there have been working with businesses. And remember I said the Division of Entrepreneurship and Economic Development, there's a divisional partnership in that project. And of course when we talk about businesses, agriculture still remains a big one, and we're still very much involved in that as well. The story of Mercer. The story of Mercer, and many of you know where that is, it's on Highway 51 north of Minocqua about 20-25 miles maybe. Something like that. Their downtown area suffered years of neglect in the decades following mine closures. We're not trying to predict the future here. We're just saying this is what happened. To restore the area and boost tourism, UW Extension from Iron County, with their community development educator and local partners, helped form the Mercer Downtown and Community Development Group. 

What's happening here? We have an educator who brings skill sets of knowledge of economic development. The educator is in the community, knows that Mercer has challenges, has built relationships with the business community and probably the leadership of the town of Mercer to help them achieve their goals. About a month ago, maybe two months ago, I was in a presentation. A fellow from Michigan State talked about inreach. Now, outreach is a big word on campus. Outreach and extension, we hear all about it. Outreach and inreach was an interesting conversation for us to have. His perspective of outreach, although it has value in that faculty reach out to communities and work with them on various issues, and this is being a little harsh, I will admit, on people who are strong outreach people, is that in his impression outreach too often is a group of people coming to a community with an answer. Being in a community long enough to get some data out of it, kind of like running through, kind of an exploitive approach. You go in, you work with a community, you learn something from it, you publish, you wander back to campus, and that's it. 

As opposed to inreach. Inreach is what we try to do. So whoever the educator was at the time went to the town of Mercer with a question, not an answer. Yeah he's got plenty of answers, but you've got to get the right questions asked in order to get those answers. And UW Extension also provided and worked with that community, provided grant writing assistance, brought in $3 million worth of grants for the community, and now Mercer is being transformed into a tourism location in the heart of Wisconsin tourist industry that will get a boost tomorrow when they get 48 inches of snow in the northern part of the state. Discovery. There's a lot of stories in this picture. Discovery is scholarship. It's about how we connect to the research base. And you know the University of Wisconsin has a strong legacy in dairy in this state. 

The dairy industry was built on, go out and just look at the names of the buildings. You'll find them. They're out there. That really was the foundation of the dairy industry. A great application of research being taken out and used on dairy farms. Well, as you look at here, we're looking at a milking machine right now, and Doug Reinemann, who is a faculty member with an Extension appointment in the Department of Biological Systems Engineering, is a world class expert around milking systems. Dave Kammel, his counterpart, also has an Extension appointment, is another world class expert but in systems that aren't quite as high tech as the one you're looking at here. This is discovery. There's another part of discovery that's important. You'll notice you could probably guess that you may have a Hispanic or a Latino worker here. 

That's big in a Wisconsin dairy industry, and obviously the Wisconsin dairy industry are big proponents of immigration reform because it's their workforce. And so back in the '90s or so, as we started to see larger farms hire Hispanic workers, we wanted to be inclusive in reaching them with educational materials. We happened to have an institute on campus called the Babcock Institute, works with dairy internationally, and they've been doing a lot of work in South America. They had written materials in Spanish. They had posters in Spanish. They had all this stuff. So, ah-ha, we'll put the posters and written materials on the walls in the milking parlors. The workers will read those in Spanish and know what to do. A little error of assumption here. They were not literate in Spanish. 

So you've got to know the community, you've got to know the learning styles. Didn't take us long to go to pictures and videos and spoken language to help train dairy workers on Hispanic working dairy farms in Wisconsin. We also learned that in fact milking cows was the easiest part of the educational program for them. They were moving from small rural communities in Mexico to areas around Appleton, areas on the western side of the state. You know, there might be a cultural difference or two. There might some challenges to overcome. And the big education program was really about that translation, not translation, that making a move across cultures. How do you do an apartment? How do you do a checking account? How do I wire money to my family in Mexico? How do I get a driver's license? And all the kinds of questions that required partnerships that we formed with Health and Human Services agencies and nonprofits all over the state. So discovery has a lot of meaning. University research is important. 

Learning from the workers themselves how to learn is important. Understanding their living conditions and building those relationships was important as well. This begins to introduce, as you can probably gather here, to our 4-H science, technology, engineering, and math program area. It cuts across all program and projects areas. STEM projects have become really popular over the last 10-15 years. This has changed. I always thought that our 4-H youth development programs were about leadership development. And we've learned by engaging youth, particularly in a middle school age, particularly female, to be more interested in STEM projects. We need a new picture here because there's no females in it. I just noticed. 

Oops. Do a Photoshop work there. No, just kidding. We need to do that because the point is that we are building a workforce now. The number of retirees in the science community in this country is astounding. And the pipeline isn't producing them. So we need to engage more youth in having interests in these areas so that they see that the value in it, the application in it, the fun in it, and they stay in those careers and end up being engineering students, computer science students, agricultural science students at universities all over the country to help maintain our position as a powerful contributor to the global economy. So STEM projects use an inquiry based learning approach. Here we go. This is not about lecturing about how to build a robot. 

This is hands-on, working with kids, and it's given us a whole new set of volunteers. Most parents do not have the skill sets to help provide technical expertise on STEM. There are a lot of manufacturing businesses in Wisconsin. There are a lot of manufacturing businesses in Wisconsin that use robotics. And there's a lot of businesses who have in their mission statement community service. Bingo. Beautiful partnership. Engineers working with kids on robotics and STEM projects has been a great opportunity for us. It's expanded our scope. It's got us in the center of being seen as a part of, I don't know, 12-year-olds workforce development. 

Really that's what we're talking about here. This provides opportunities to improve. These are important characteristics of our 4-H program: mastery, independence, belonging, and generosity. Those are four important skill sets that we think are important to leadership development in our youth. And our projects include also aerospace, water, computers, small engines, electricity, electronics, astronomy, energy, and robotics. As you can see here, these aren't lab pictures. These are not lecture pictures. These pictures are hands-on kind of experience. We're on the ground. We call it our on the ground educational programming. 

We have offices all over the state. I would dare say that if 20% of our educational programs actually occur in that building, I'd be shocked. We go where the people are to provide learning environments. Obviously you can't do water sampling in an office in the southeast side of Dane County. You've got to go out to a watershed to do that, and work with our educators, our environmental educators at UW Stevens Point in providing environmental education and engaging volunteers so that we have projects now that support citizen stream monitoring. So you kind of get a sense we're big about leverage. We've talked about adult volunteers in the 4-H program and the STEM program. I've not even talked about Master Gardener volunteer program yet, which is also part of our Extension program. We leverage. The resource growth that we see as most important for us is not money. 

The resource growth that's most important for us are people. And growing our own capacity as people and building partnerships with organization and bringing a volunteer workforce, like Tom did tonight to the show here, is a great example of how we leverage a small investment and expand access to a much larger number of people than we could alone. So there's volunteer efforts like Citizen Lake Monitoring Networks. There's a lot of issues around chemicals and the like and fertilizers, and the lake north of this campus has some issues around phosphorus perhaps. A lot of lakes in this state have issues like that. Water action volunteers clean boats, clean waters with invasive species issues. All kinds of volunteer programs in which we get involved. We try to be inclusive. This is one of the most fascinating experiences I had. This is in a Lac du Flambeau tribal nation up in Lac du Flambeau. 

I don't remember if the name here, I don't remember the name itself. This is that person who does tours for people to help learn about the culture of the Lac du Flambeau and the Ojibwe Nation in general. So Wisconsin is home to 11 federally recognized tribes and sovereign tribal governments. Cooperative Extension has offices, as I said before, within three of these nations: Lac du Flambeau, Menominee and Lac Courte Oreilles. We work with many of the state tribes on community, youth, family, natural resources, and community development issues. Our Native American task force also works to educate elected officials and colleagues about Native American issues. And, clearly, working across cultural boundaries with Native Americans is not easy for us. Learning styles are different, the concept of time is different, the value of nature is different, the importance of building relationships is different, and the importance to us of hiring from within a community is key. We currently have three educators in Menominee County. Menominee County is 95% reservation, the Menominee Nation reservation. 

Three of our staff there are Menominee. I cannot tell you the difference of the acceptance of our programs in Menominee Nation and in that community and partnering with the College of Menominee Nation because we did that. We actually wrote the PDs and limited the search to Menominee County because we felt it was that important. Our work in nutrition education with Hmong populations is many fold better because we hire Hmong, usually young adults who are bilingual. So it's very important for us. The Lac du Flambeau Tribal Cooperative Extension Office created 10 educational programs to improve organizational development in response to a request from the Lac du Flambeau Tribal Human Resource Department. Program topics included team building, dealing with change, communications, and conflict management. As you can guess, the development in casinos in tribal communities has been a blessing and a curse. In some cases because of the dollar distributions from those casinos doesn't provide a lot of motivation for sort if you want to call personal growth and developing careers. And that's created huge problems. 

There are drug issues in Native American cultures. Brian is our community development educator at Lac du Flambeau, he is Lac du Flambeau, he is so respected that just about anything that comes up as an issue, guess who they call? Brian is the go-to guy in Lac du Flambeau, and he brings expertise from the white community of his colleagues as well as other Native Americans to bear on those issues.  Inclusiveness, obviously that's important for us to engage. If you've listened at all to the early comments of our new president, Ray Cross, who we know well as a former chancellor of UW Extension and UW Colleges, he has long held an interest in building more effective in our educational program in the city of Milwaukee. You know the statistics. We don't need to talk about them. It is a disaster, in terms particularly of young African American males. The STEM program, robotics programs, working with schools, multiplying our efforts to engage African American youth in projects is very important to us.  As you know, we have a high incarcerated population in Wisconsin, and our family living program, remember that was home ec when I described it early as a legacy program, our family living program in many counties, working in county jails has provided educational programming in parenting and financial management to jailed inmates. Some of my colleagues who've been in family living for 30 years, I'm pretty sure they never saw that one coming. 

Why do we do this? Because an incarcerated person is a family issue. It might be the bread winner, it might be the mother. It breaks the families apart.  And building better skill sets so that when they get out of jail they don't come back, and there's research which shows that education matters. And you can imagine how much appreciated that is by county governments who have tough county budgets, and the cost of incarcerating citizens is huge. So that's very important to us. We tend to do this primarily with county inmates less so than the state because the county inmates tend to be from that county, are likely to have families in that county, and are going to relocate in that  county, so for us it seems to make more sense to focus our efforts there. Relationships, I talked about this before, are very important to us. Our programming is effective because of our building relationships. Remember, I said the most important resource, volunteers, other organizations, partnering groups, because that expands access and it helps them. 

It expands the number of people that we reach and the impacts that we have in our extension programming. Our Wisconsin Nutrition Education program is a program that is part of a national network as well. This is primarily funded by $9 million in funds from the SNAP program within the food and Nutrition Service of the United States Department of Agriculture. For those of you who paid attention to the farm bill saga over the last several months, you knew the nutrition title was a big issue, right? Now, it turned out that the final numbers of the reductions were much closer to the Senate than House versions. In all of that, the SNAP Ed program because a point of conversation. And you have, as you know, ideologically very different views in the House and Senate, the majority parties in each of those houses, over self-sufficiency and the role of government. And SNAP Ed found itself in the cross hairs of that conversation. It is hugely important to education. Nutrition matters. To job performance, to being able to be a successful contributor to the community. 

This is core educational programming for us. The dollars we get from SNAP Ed are actually bigger than those we get from Smith-Lever. That's how important it is for us. And we have nutrition education programs in 69 of the 72 counties with a heavy emphasis on the urban counties and reaching underserved populations. I mentioned earlier the centennial of 4-H is coming up. I've already talked about most of this on the slide. This hundred years of growing Wisconsin leaders is what 4-H is about. 4-H is a national phenomena. There's a National 4-H Council which raises huge amounts of funds that contribute to 4-H programs all over the country.  As I indicated, Walworth County was the first county to engage the 4-H program, and it really does embody the Wisconsin Idea that the resources of the university shall be extended to the people of the state where they live and work. 

Relationships. This looks like a county courthouse. It is. We do educational programming for elected officials. Now, you may think there's no need for that when you see their elected officials around the state. Why would they need education. [LAUGHTER] That's just a question. It was rhetorical. [LAUGHTER] This is going to be broadcast, right? Okay, good. The reality is that many people get elected to office for all kinds of reasons, and when they get there there's a lot to learn about conducting board meetings, about open records, about open meetings, about all kinds of issues that are important to us. 

We have a local government center in Cooperative Extension that provides educational programming for county officials, municipal, town, city, village officials all over the state. And it's a huge value added program to those counties and those municipalities. Last year, in the past two years the local government center worked with more than 3,000 elected officials at workshops. Think how big that reach really is when you think about it. 3,000 elected officials, 25 statewide teleconferences in the last year, 4500 more elected officials. And the evaluation of those programs come in at 90% of the participants rating those programs as very good or excellent. So we're clearly hitting a mark in terms of those programs. Recognizing each family member contributes to a farming operation, particularly when you have even single-family or multi-family farms. We have discovered, and we've known this for a long time, that many farm women are actually the accountants on farms. They are essentially the business managers on the farms. 

So we've actually developed a program designed to reach Wisconsin women in agricultural, and increasingly we actually see more and more women actually being the primary farmer with the spouse, the husband, working off the farm. So the heart of the farm project of working with farm women, developing educational programs, and as you can imagine farm women learn differently than farm men, it's very important for us. And we also have Jenny Vanderlin and Joy Kirkpatrick, two female staff members here at Wisconsin Madison campus really leading that effort.  Respect has lots of meanings. And this is the last of values, and I've got about three slides to go. Respect for us is important, and respect for the voice of youth in governance is something that's become very important to us. We are a leadership program in our 4-H and youth development programs, and over the last 10 or 15 years we have worked with particularly county governments and sometimes town governments to have youth serve on county boards in a non-voting capacity. Nonetheless, serve on county boards, be on committees, be part of that decision making process, and often very highly respected voices that bring a voice to those deliberations that elected officials simply don't have. It's been a growth opportunity for us, and you can see this is a Dane County example here. Douglas County had the first program where we had youth positions added to the town board and the Superior City Council. 

Since the program started, adults on the boards have come to respect and seek ideas and opinions from the youth appointees while youth have learned valuable civic lessons and hopefully added some civility to the conversations in those county boards. Another obviously growth area of education for us is caregiving. Many of you may be part of sandwich generation or have been or are or will be part of that sandwich generation where you have both youth and adults, parents, alive. Caregiving is a huge industry in this state, and caregiving is a huge, burden is not quite the right word, but a responsibility for many people who work. Caregiving itself in the United States is a $450 billion industry, and education on an ongoing basis for caregivers of adults is very important to make sure that the best education is happening in that regard. We've done work with businesses to help businesses understand the caregiving needs of their employees, which they really had no idea of and they're shocked when they see the results which has resulted in different policies. More flexible leave times, more flexible work schedules so that caregiving can occur within a home.  This is actually a picture of inmates at the Rock County Jail learning skill sets. I talked about parenting and financial management skill sets are developed. We find that, first of all, this is great. 

The inmates love being outside and not in their jail cells or in the areas around those jail cells, and they build skill sets by being involved in garden projects. For us it's been very fulfilling. In many cases sometimes the food is even used within the facility itself in terms of what's grown in those gardens. So with that, we're getting close to the end of the hour here, and I would like to end this conversation with you, it's been pretty one way so far, to see if you have any questions or comments. So thank you for your attention. Thank you for being here and part of the lab series that Tom sponsors during the course of the year. [APPLAUSE]