INNOVATION IN EXTENSION: Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University

The following describes an innovative person.

Region: Southern

Contact information for this innovator: Daniel Goerlich
Job title / position: District director

Contact number: 434-766-6761

Email address: dalego@vt.edu

Brief description of innovator as provided in online survey: Dan has been creative in describing and filling agent positions that cut across traditional program areas, primarily as it relates to community food systems.

Notes from phone interview:

Yeah I thought it was just worth noting. He's our District Director and Dan is one of those great gifts in that he has the ability to look at the world entirely differently than the rest of us on most days, which I just love because I'll think I have something worked out, and Dan will say, "Well did you think about this?" and it just throws it all in a heap. But one of the things that he's done is he has been incredibly attuned to the local government that he works with and their needs. He's district director. He has in several counties, he has been able-- where we had had a Family Consumer Science agent, and there's a lot of history behind this, it's not worth going into but by hiring [?] left or retired of whatever, then the county had dropped funding during hard times, and he knew that based upon what we had before, he could not come back and ask for a family consumer agent. But what he could do is he would come back and he would ask for community food systems agent, or a food safety agent, and he was able to build that-- I mean he would get funding for that, incredible support for that, and he's hired really bright, energetic, creative young people to do that. Traditionally we would have hired somebody with family consumer sciences background into that role. He's hired somebody that's got a degree in Animal Science, or Horticulture, that comes in, increases the whole visibility of the program. It makes them think twice about what they understand as family consumer sciences, and it adds to culture, and it integrates across programs, and I just give him a lot of credit for being willing to think of it in a different context that was acceptable to very rural, traditional counties, and making it happen. He's been very successful at that, and so on.


The following describes an innovation.

Region: Southern

Main contact information for this innovation: Michael Lambur

Main contact job title / position: Associate Director for Program Development

Main contact number: 540-231-1634

Main contact email address:  lamburm@vt.edu

Innovation name: District Program Leadership Teams

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: With limited staff resources and an increased rate of hires, we developed teams in each district to teach programming, provide mentorship, and encourage organizational development and effectiveness.

Notes from phone interview:

We went through a major budget cut in 2009 in Virginia, and with that we offered an early retirement program. In fact it's before I even got here, I spent most of my career in North Carolina. So the numbers of agents in the field, as well as faculty on campus, dropped dramatically, because a lot of people took those early retirement options. And so right as I got here, we went through-- I call it the period of unpleasantness. It was a whole political issue. The outcome of it was very, very good in that we were given some money to restore some positions, and in fact from the period of time when I got here as director, and within three years we had hired 100 new agents. Not all of those were new positions, because we had some other subsequent retirements and separations, but we hired 100 new people, and we have a total of 240 agents in the field.

So it was a significant amount of people with short tenure, and we did not have the capacity on campus to rally teach them programming, teach them planning. In some cases we hired an agent, we popped them in [?] and they were by themselves, and we pretty much had to say good luck. Which was a prescription for disaster. So instead of trying of trying to bolster the ranks on campus to support them, what we did is we took senior agents, experienced agents, in each district, and two for each program area, A&R, family consumer sciences, [?] and we put an administrative stipend supplement so that they would spend 10-15% of their time at least in developing and training those new agents. There's a rotational basis for people to be on a district program leadership team, they have to apply, it has to be approved by their district director, and we envision being able to do this as one, it gives those folks on the team some leadership opportunity, and two, it helps the agents in that district that are new. So we envision keeping that going for a period of time. 40% of the workforce has been with us less that five years.


The following describes an innovation.

Region: Southern

Main contact information for this innovation: Joe Hunnings

Main contact job title / position: Director of Planning and Reporting

Main contact number: 540-231-6595

Main contact email address:  hunnings@vt.edu

Innovation name: Diversity and Inclusion Fellows

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: This is an agent and staff team charged to raise awareness and professional development in diversity and inclusion in local unit programming. Initial emphasis is working across generations.

Notes from phone interview:

We have been thinking about this actually before we got a new president. Joe Hunnings is very intent on being diligent, about making sure that we are fulfilling our civil rights obligations and then some, and Joe had been talking with our folks on campus, we used to have Vice President for Diversity and Inclusion, but what had happened was that position actually was abolished, and the new President, who's been here just less than a year-- essentially diversity and inclusion is everybody's responsibility, and so he has in his way pushed things down, and made them accountable, primarily at the college level. But before that was really happening, Joe was having the conversation about, okay we do a really good job of the letter of what's expected from us from USDA, but are we doing what's really the right thing to be doing in our communities? And Virginia's an interesting state, probably not too different in some regards to what you experience in Ohio-- I mean, we have portions of the state that are 99.5% white, we have portions of the state that have a much higher African-American population, and then we have this area, Northern Virginia, where in some of the schools there are 120 languages spoken, because of the influence of the capital.

And so we dabble in things, and so this was one way that when Joe put out the call for agents that wanted to be fellows, they came to campus and spent a week in training from our folks in Human Resources and Diversity and Inclusion, and then they are now charged with raising awareness and helping organize in-service training, and other workshops related to Diversity and Inclusion. Their initial foray into that has been the conversation about working across generations,which is particularly relevant for us, with a whole bunch of really young creative folks and a whole bunch of old people like me, and helping those connect more together.

We knew we needed to be doing something, and Joe really figured out the way to do that was through the agents, and giving them the-- empowering them to do that and giving them the training to do that. And again it was one they had to apply for, and we're looking at building that over the future years.


The following describes an innovation.

Region: Southern

Main contact information for this innovation: Edwin Jones

Main contact job title / position: Director

Main contact number: 540-231-5299

Main contact email address:  ejones1@vt.edu

Innovation name: Integrated programming teams

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: Use of integrated, interdisciplinary teams to determine organizational programs.

Notes from phone interview:

It may not be as innovative as I think it is, according to some, but what we have done there, we have had program team per se for all eternity, and they've always been pretty much organized around what we have to put into the Federal Report. I just started the conversation here, in that I don't really care about the Federal Report. We need to fulfill our obligation, but it shouldn't drive what we do, and so I said let's turn that conversation around. They did a strategic plan a few years ago, just prior to my arrival, and I said "Let's take that. You guys did a great job of going across the state, getting all kinds of stakeholder input, looking at issues and needs." We updated that and said take those things and let's create agent specialist teams around that. And that's still not very innovative but what we're doing and where we're going with that is it's going to be out of those teams that we make resource decisions. It's going to be out of those teams that we expect programs, curricular, in service training, all of that to emerge, and if it can't come through a program team, then we have to question why we should be doing it.

It's going to be an ongoing challenge for a while, until people buy into that, because I'm still getting feedback, "Yeah this is just another dumb idea of the director and it'll go away in time. If we outlive him, it'll be all right." [laughter] Little do they know it's not going to go away, and in fact a number of the faculty have bought into it, and they're struggling with it because for once in their career, they are given a lot more flexibility and authority in determining our future than they've ever had before, and we're being really intentional about this, that these are cross-disciplinary integrated teams, and so the Associate Directors and Program Leaders are responsible for  number of them, they just split them up, and they're pushing that, and we're expecting the leadership out of those teams to be really engaging folks and saying, okay this is what extension needs to be doing, and being honest with that. It's really pushing what we have always said we'd do, but have not done very well, at least in the three states I've worked in in my career.


The following describes an innovation.

Region: Southern

Main contact information for this innovation: Lori Greiner

Main contact job title / position: Extension Communications Manager

Main contact number: 540-231-5863

Main contact email address:  lgreiner@vt.edu

Innovation name: Ed Talks

Brief description of innovation as provided in online survey: These are on average biweekly video communications to the system. They are less than 3 minutes and unedited video messages of organizational importance or recognition of accomplishments and activities of agents and specialists.

Notes from phone interview:

And I don't know where this goes. I know that there's always the question that the director doesn't communicate well enough with the organization and when I came here I tried sending out an email periodically, and those things were often hard to craft. It was always challenging to put in writing something, especially if it related to salary increases or changes in administrative things, and things like that, that didn't come back to haunt you because somebody read it entirely differently and you opened up a whole big debate that was unnecessary and unproductive, when what they read wasn't what you meant, but that's what you wrote.

And so, Lori, in our communications staff, she said, "Why don't we just do a videotape." We started that, and she's evaluated it and it gets pretty favorable reviews for a couple of reasons. One is it's usually short. We never have it more than three minutes, I never cover more than two or three topics, and it's unedited, which means sometimes I've had to say, do multiple takes, but it's at one time [crosstalk] and if you looked at them, you'd see where I flubbed up and that was still the best take of the day. But it's much easier to do that, and my communication style is much easier to talk about something than it is to write a big epistle about it. And so it amazes me, I get people saying, "You know I just really love that because I can turn that on and listen to it while I'm doing something else," or, "It's short and I don't have to read another email, because I'm tired of reading emails," and the issues of me not communicating enough have dropped dramatically, because I'm doing that. And it was just an easy thing to do, and I have to credit the communications staff for doing it. I remember when we used to send out a monthly videotape in North Carolina, and that was a major production, you had to have a day to do it [crosstalk] and then the staff would all have to gather around and watch it, and that wasn't always a pleasant experience. But it is just short and sweet, and get to the point and be done.