Three new titles are available on the Extension Foundation’s website. The brief publications – written as magazine-style feature stories – share project work funded through the New Technologies for Ag Extension (NTAE) program, a cooperative agreement between USDA NIFA, Oklahoma State University, and the Extension Foundation. NTAE’s goal is to incubate, accelerate, and expand promising work that will increase the impact of the Cooperative Extension System (CES) in the communities it serves, and provide models that can be adopted or adapted by Extension teams across the nation. 

Each of the publications is excerpted from the New Technologies for Ag Extension 2022-2023 Yearbook, an 83-page magazine, which shares how these grant projects improve human, environmental, and community health. 

• West Virginia University Extension – “My Hometown is Cool.” Educators at West Virginia University Extension have created a toolkit to teach youth how to be community developers and entrepreneurs. This publication provides a brief overview of how the program works and what the creators hope to accomplish with this exciting program.

• West Virginia State University – “Out of the Mines.” This publication shares how an NTAE project team is focused on helping rural communities in West Virginia capitalize on historical and natural resources, to compensate for the dwindling coal-based economy. Extension professionals from West Virginia State University planned to pilot the concept in Kimball, West Virginia. In this story, you’ll learn why this effort is critical for southern West Virginia and what the team hopes to accomplish. 

• University of Massachusetts, Amherst – “Capacity Building – Expanding Urban Extension.”  A University of Massachusetts Extension team plans to train up to 10 UMass Extension educators to engage more effectively with underserved and urban audiences in a wider range of communities in Springfield, Massachusetts, and across the state. The team will also partner with a variety of community organizations to develop resources and programs that use and build on the strengths of this broader target audience. This publication provides a brief overview of the program’s goals and strategies.

The Extension Foundation carries dozens of titles in its library. Four to five additional publications are slated to hit the shelf each week through the end of November. Sign up to receive publication notifications here. You can find the entire library of publications here.