Workshops

In the Building Extension’s Public Value workshop, we highlight three main ways Extension programs create public value. Programs address concerns about fairness, close an information gap, or encourage actions that benefit the greater community (or equivalently, discourage actions that impose costs on the community). Each of these can be thought of as a criterion or justification for public sector involvement. In my experience, most Extension programs focus on the third type of value creation and base their public value message on the ways a program encourages beneficial activities.

We can’t generalize from this non-scientific poll, but I wondered about the lack of attention to the fairness criterion. In the workshop, I encourage program teams to use this criterion with caution. Whether the unfairness of a situation warrants public sector action is subjective, and stakeholders with different values may assess fairness differently. So, I think Extension makes a more effective case when it uses the fairness criterion selectively. For this reason, I wasn’t surprised by the small number of responses for fairness. I wondered, though, whether it arose because respondents thought their programs did not address a concern about fairness, or if they thought the program did address fairness, but they planned to emphasize a different criterion in order to make a stronger case.

Do you think a relatively small share of Extension programs address a fairness concern? Which criterion would you have chosen for the Extension programs you work with?

The post How do your programs create public value? appeared first on Building Extension's Public Value.

Is it enough for a stakeholder to learn that your program produced public value, or do stakeholders want to know how much value was created? Put another way, is it adequate to demonstrate that a program has a positive return on investment for a community? Or does it have to have a higher return than all the alternative investments the community could have made?

I was asked this question today at a Center for Integrative Leadership Research Forum where I presented, “How Cross Sector Leadership Builds Extension’s Public Value.” It seems that the answer has to be yes, it does matter whether a program generates a large or small amount of public benefit relative to its cost.

A potential funder wants to direct dollars toward their highest use. Ideally, all programs would report a return using a common metric. The metric could be dollars for programs whose impacts can be monetized (i.e., converted to dollars); it could be some other common metric (e.g., amount of pollution remediation, high school graduation rate) for programs addressing similar issues. With common metrics, a funder could rank programs by return on investment and fund as many of the top programs as they can.

Such apples-to-apples comparisons must be rare, though, even for programs with common objectives. I also imagine that the magnitude of a programs’ expected public value–if it is known–will inform, but not drive a funder’s decision.

What has your experience been? Have you sought funding from a source that demands to know the expected return on their investment in terms of dollars or some other metric? Do you know of funders that use those metrics to rank programs by return?

Interested in a short introduction to “Building Extension’s Public Value”? Check out this Working Differently in Extension Podcast, featuring a conversation between Bob Bertsch of Agricultural Communication at North Dakota State University and me. If you’d like to actually see us converse, check out the video of the podcast below.

Occasionally I become aware that some of the participants in a BEPV workshop have had prior experience with the workshop. Some may have participated in a full workshop or completed the train-the-trainer course, others may have been introduced to the BEPV content in a speech or webinar.

Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik on FlickR.

I am often uncertain about how to address the range of experience in the audience. If I teach primarily to the inexperienced, I run the risk of disengaging those familiar with the content. If I teach to those with experience, I may frustrate the newbies. Because I usually do the former, I am willing to bet that more than a few participants have emerged from one of my workshops mumbling, “Well, that was nothing new.”

Last week at a training session for the LEAD21 leadership development program, a trainer used an approach that I think can be effective with a mixed-level-of-experience group. The trainer first asked group members who had been through a similar training to identify themselves. S/he then named these people as the group’s experts on the topic, and said that s/he would call on them to enrich the training by sharing their own experiences. Instead of expressing unease that some people in the group were already familiar with the content (which I’m sure I have done), the trainer showed gratitude that the room was rich with peer expertise.

Here are some ways I can see using this approach in a BEPV workshop:

==Ask people with prior experience to not only identify themselves, but describe briefly the kind of experience they have had (e.g., prior workshop, writing public value messages).
==If time allows–and if the experts are few in number–ask them to explain why they have chosen to attend the training again. I might use that information to more effectively prioritize the program content.
==Arrange participants so that the experts are distributed among the work groups.
==Before setting groups to work on an activity, ask the experts what they recall as the pitfalls for that activity, For example, I can imagine someone saying, “I remember that it takes a while to get all the way through the stakeholder exercise. Make sure you quickly choose a program to work on and move ahead to the exercise.”
==During the next steps module, ask the experts what steps they have taken since their original training, and what obstacles and successes they have experienced.

I am grateful to the LEAD21 trainers for the reminder to draw “expert” participants into the conversation and to encourage them to share their knowledge with their peers.

(Photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik on FlickR.)

This year’s Public Issues Leadership Development (PILD) Conference, to be held April 21-24 in Alexandria, VA, has been organized around the theme of “What you CAN do!” The program is packed with practical guidance on how to effectively advocate for Extension with elected officials and stakeholders. There will be two opportunities to hear about the public value approach to communicating about Extension programs. On Monday I will give a keynote talk,”You CAN Understand and Effectively Communicate the Public Value of Cooperative Extension.” I will give a brief introduction to the public value approach and then present my current thinking about how Extension organizations can make a stronger public value case going forward. Then on Tuesday, I will teach a mini Building Extension’s Public Value Workshop for any conference attendees who have not been through the program or who would like to apply the approach to a program of their own. I hope to see you there!

Elements of a program’s design can influence how much public value the program can create. Module 9 of the Building Extension’s Public Value Presenter’s Guide lists a number of those elements:

When I was at the 2012 Women in Agriculture Educators National Conference last week, I was reminded of the risk management education program for farm and ranch women known as Annie’s Project. It is an example of a program that achieves its impact by targeting a carefully selected audience: women who are motivated to be involved in a farm or ranch business. Not knowing much more about the project than that, I wondered how the Annie’s Project curriculum is tailored to its target audience. After all, if the program could achieve its objectives using all the same approaches as a traditional risk management education program–which historically were targeted to men–then it wouldn’t be necessary to have a separate program for women.

I have learned, partly from this 2010 Journal of Agricultural Education article by Lynn Hambleton Heins, Jeff Beaulieu, and Ira Altman, some of the ways that Annie’s Project is designed to be particularly effective with farm women learners. For example, the curriculum recognizes that women typically play different roles in the farm business and have different motivations for being involved in the business than men do.

I have also read and heard elsewhere–not in the Heins, Beaulieu, Altman paper–that the Annie’s Project uses educational approaches that address the specific learning needs of women, who learn better in supportive environments with other women. I haven’t found an article that describes these specific educational approaches or presents evidence that they are more effective with women learners than approaches used in traditional risk management classes. If any readers know of such a source, please let me know. With that evidence, I think Annie’s Project can be a fine example of a program that maximizes its public value through careful program design.

Source: Hambleton Heins, Lynn, Jeff Beaulieu, and Ira Altman. “The Effectiveness of Women’s Agricultural Education Programs; a Survey from Annie’s Project.” Journal of Agricultural Education 51,4 (2010):1-9.

Module 7 of the Building Extension’s Public Value workshop leads participants to answer the question “Why Extension?”–that is, why should Cooperative Extension, and not some other public or private entity, develop and deliver outreach education programs? We answer the question by listing the people and organizations that are perceived to deliver programs that are similar to what Extension does, and naming Extension’s strengths relative to those alternative providers. The result is a type of asset inventory: a list of the qualities that make Extension a preferred source for programming or the assets that we bring to the table when we engage in partnerships. The inventory usually includes Extension’s trained educators, research-based curricula, local knowledge, statewide and national networks, and connection to the land-grant university.

It can be affirming for Extension professionals to assemble this asset inventory and see the organization’s strengths. However, the exercise also gives us an opportunity for transformative learning through a disorienting dilemma, an idea from Jack Mezirow that I learned from Nancy Franz and wrote about in these blog entries.

The fact is, we can only use our list of Extension’s strengths to make our case for Extension funding if the items on the list are true. In the “Why Extension?” exercise, I challenge participants to think about whether their organization really does ensure that educators are using the best teaching methods, curricula are based on current research and local knowledge, and connections to the university and to key networks are maintained. Inevitably, I hear participants share that for their organization, there is frankly room for improvement in at least some of these areas.

I think this challenge can create a disorienting dilemma for some participants: they have been asked to switch from admiring their organization’s strengths to recognizing some of its weaknesses. I suggest that the way out of the dilemma is to see the asset inventory as a list of possible investments that Extension administrators can make to shore up Extension’s strengths. Investing in our strengths can help us make Extension’s best case.

I thought about this opportunity for disorientation and transformative learning on Tuesday of this week when I lead the “Why Extension?” exercise for Virginia Cooperative Extension professionals. Were you at the VCE workshop? What did you think of the exercise? Have you taught this module? What approaches work for you?

At the OMAFRA public value workshop last week, a participant suggested that in order to make a strong public value case for Extension programs, we cannot only provide funding for program delivery. We must also invest in research and program evaluation that will provide the data to support public value messages. She said that in the following diagram of a public value message, we need to “fund the arrows”–the links between the stages of the model. Not only will funding the arrows help us make our best funding case, it can also help us choose which programs to prioritize. For anyone with budgeting responsibility, what do you think? Should we “fund the arrows”?

 

Are you an Extension or outreach educator who works with women in agriculture? Do you develop, evaluate or teach risk management education programs? Are you planning to attend the 2012 Women in Agriculture Educators Annual Conference in Memphis, TN? I will be there on March 29, 2012, to present “Creating Public Value with Risk Management Education.”

How do you think risk management education programs create public value? How are programs targeted to women in agriculture different from more general programs? Whether you share your ideas here or bring them up at the conference, I look forward to hearing from you!

Last week I spoke about creating public value with animal health and welfare programs at the Ontario Ministry of Agriculture, Food, and Rural Affairs (OMAFRA) Animal Health Forum in Guelph.

I also taught a public value workshop for OMAFRA and University of Guelph Extension professionals. If you picked up the url for this blog at the OMAFRA events, welcome! Feel free to explore the site and contribute comments and/or questions on any of the entries. Or, if you prefer, email your comments and questions to me at kalam002 at-sign umn dot edu. Also, if you participated in the March 9 workshop, look for an email with a link to an end-of-workshop survey. The survey contains only a few questions and should take very little time to complete. I will use the results to evaluate the workshop’s effectiveness and to improve future public value offerings. Thank you for your feedback!