In November 2007, educators, faculty, and staff were encouraged to share their thoughts through a blog around three topic areas regarding strategic and operational recommendations. Below is a summary of the emerging themes relating to structural issues that have been culled from the blog discussions.

• Field staff are spread too thin. Staff generally feel as if they are expected to wear too many hats and would prefer to focus on a narrow breadth so they can do more justice to addressing depth.
• Program specialists who deliver education over a multicounty area are preferable to generalist educators who have to be responsible for a wide range of program areas.
• There is a need to focus on proactively developing and nurturing local political relationships. This is seen as critically important and needs to be a specific part of someone’s responsibilities, preferably not someone who is overloaded with program delivery responsibilities.
• Program delivery priorities should be driven from the county, not from campus, to be responsive to local issues and needs. This may mean picking and choosing from among a wide set of program options and/or customizing content to fit needs at the local level.
• Program development should be driven from affiliations with academic department and faculty on campus. Strengthen ties to faculty with respect to extension programming.
• Area administrative support teams that interface with field staff across multiple counties may be able to offer broader-based support than is possible, if organized at the individual county level.
• Centralized grant development and marketing/communications support from campus would help to relieve some of the field workload. Centrally organizing these functions would allow for specialists with expertise in grantsmanship and marketing to strengthen Extension’s capabilities in these areas.

Your contributions to these topics are appreciated. The full discussion can be found at:  http://www.personal.psu.edu/phc1/blogs/CASPP/.

Nancy Franklin
Director of Strategic Initiatives
Penn State Outreach/Cooperative Extension