As Director of Cornell Cooperative Extension, I am delighted that County Associations around New York have been involved in the Impact Collaborative. One example of the success of this program is the unique, virtual opportunity for our Livingston County team to work through a creative and structured process to explore and develop a concept in a short period of time. It also helped with goals they had around team building. The Impact Collaborative provided our team with access to effective coaching and expert informants, which will help this work not only maintain momentum, but grow. The pandemic has been challenging for all of us, but this event and the process proved a bright spot for our Livingston County team.

The Impact Collaborative provided an excellent space for this team to collaborate on and develop their project with a network of experienced Extension professionals and find innovative ways to build off the work from the Coming Together for Racial Understanding cohort. Even more amazing has been their ability to adapt what they have gained from the Impact Collaborative and apply it to local issues. At each Impact Collaborative experience, the team has returned to Tuskegee University with a more developed project plan, and the opportunities they’ve had with the Impact Collaborative has helped shape a better vision for addressing this strategic priority. Their experience has also helped us to develop outcomes related to critical dialogue across all of our programming.

The Impact Collaborative provided an ideal space for the Malheur Workforce Readiness team to work through a structured process that challenged their thinking and assisted them with building a strong, informed, foundation. It equipped them with critical insights on how to best evaluate their program and the potential impact, and better communicate and engage with their partners moving forward.

The Impact Collaborative prepared the CIVIC team with new skills, resources, and opportunities that have helped them come together as a team to accelerate and scale their program. Their involvement with the Impact Collaborative has helped create new pathways for reaching a more diverse audience, find strategic ways to engage new partners, and better help Extension professionals across Florida facilitate a process that builds community capacity in addressing challenging issues such as climate change, sustainability, opioid addiction, and water quality.

My most recent experience with the Impact Collaborative was simply brilliant. Having the opportunity to develop a program idea into an achievable project through numerous interactions with subject matter specialists – not programmatic subject matter specialists, but soft-skill subject matter specialists, teams of colleagues from across the country, identified coaches and my team from home was priceless. Our interactions not only gave us a more global perspective on our project – and our National mission -, it also provided us the opportunity to become a more cohesive team.