“To establish an effective community spirit”: A Land Grant Extension and deliberative dialogue

✍ Scribed by Monica Herrera; Joyce Hoelting

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2010
• Weight: 50 KB
• Volume: 2010
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0271-0560
• DOI: 10.1002/he.411

✦ Synopsis

and Washington to involve them in a program initiative to address rural poverty. After a strategic planning process, NWAF had shifted from traditional grant making to operating programs that address poverty. One program was called Horizons. Its goal was to nurture rural leadership and mobilize local energy to address poverty.

To Cooperative Extension leaders, the prospect of delivering the program was both exciting and daunting. On one hand, the initiative's goals made good use of Extension's relationships with rural communities and spoke to Extension's historic charge. In 1909, Theodore Roosevelt's Commission on Country Life described the goal for Extension this way: "It is to the Extension department of [the land grant] colleges . . . that we must now look for the most effective rousing of the people on the land . . . . It is of the greatest consequence that the people of the open country should learn to work together, not only for the purpose of forwarding their economic interests and of competing with other men who are organizing, but also to develop themselves and to establish an effective community spirit" (Commission on Country Life, 1909).

With that charge, Extension rooted itself deeply in "educational organizing that develops civic leadership skills and capacities, and builds respectful, reciprocal relationships between universities and communities through