Dear Extension Faculty, Staff, and Educators:

Spring is in the air! The sun is brighter, the days are getting longer. Surely the warmer temperatures are right around the corner! Seasons change right before our eyes, and Spring brings with it a sense of freshness and starting anew — revitalization. It invites us to not only reassess and improve ourselves personally, but to “reframe” ourselves organizationally so we are ready and able to meet the challenges of our future.

As such, the Extension Leadership Team has made significant progress toward developing a final plan to reframe extension. Although we had hoped to provide a straw plan at the beginning of the year, it was not possible to finalize all aspects in that timeframe. Below is a summary of the current status of this process.

The input from the surveys conducted over the last six months (county commissioners, Advisory Council members, and county extension directors), discussions with Extension Annual Conference participants (county educators, staff, and faculty), Outreach Advisory Council, Penn State Ag Council, and academic units, and the on-line blog, has been compiled and synthesized.

From this input a number of critical programmatic and operational issues were identified that are limiting our organization’s ability to function in a highly effective and efficient manner. The input provided a comprehensive look at our organization and the commonality of issues that are seen as barriers to working efficiently in our organization. To address these key issues, two implementation committees have been convened to develop outcomes that need to take place in order to improve functionality in our organization.

The first committee is the Program Implementation Committee that is being lead by Dr. Marilyn Corbin. This committee has been charged to address the following issues:

• Develop a planning and reporting system that is for the benefit of the individual and program team, not for performance management
• Develop a consistent process to set priorities and make decisions about resource allocation
• Develop an improved linkage between programming effort and marketing and communications
• Examine how we can do a better job of evaluating program impacts (i.e., team impacts, not individual performance)
• Develop a way to more effectively evaluate the contribution of educators, program teams, county and regional units, and academic units to program success
• Provide clarity to program leadership lines and empower program leaders in the system

• Restructure the educator hiring process to include a strong state-level screening process
• Identify the structure and resources needed to implement the Programmatic Implementation Committee’s recommendations to improve the linkage between programs and Communications and Marketing
• Provide recommendations on how we can provide grant and contract writing assistance within the system
• Define the new role that CEDs, RDs, and program leaders will play in the new environment
• Define the administrative structure that will support the new operational environment
• Clarify the protocol to solicit and identify statewide program staffing needs and cost-share partners

The committees have representation from county educators, county extension directors, program leaders, regional directors, academic unit leaders, faculty, staff, and the associate director. The committees have met and are in the process of developing a set of outcomes that are needed to make positive changes to our organization. A draft of the recommendations will be compiled and shared with the director of Extension.

The reframing of our organization is designed to improve programming and operations and should not be viewed as something to fear. Some job responsibilities may change, but there is no intent to reduce the size of our organization. Our goal is to move our organization forward so it is positioned well to meet the challenges of the coming decade.

We hope you will embrace this process, provide critical input, and support the implementation. Additional details will follow in the weeks and months ahead.

Daney and Dennis