Además

In a 30-year career as an Extension agent, specialist, administrator and college dean, I have been challenged countless times to explain the Cooperative Extension Service in a sentence. The usual response includes a list of Extension program areas: agriculture, youth, families and community development.

This fails to capture what the questioner is really looking for, the essence of Extension. To many observers, the essence is the network of professionals in every county in the state. There is no end of people who want badly to plug into the network to carry their message to the state's citizenry. Still, being a network is a characteristic of, not the essence of, Extension.

Extension's essence is the constant that has sometimes become lost in the past 90 years of change. Extension certainly looks different than it did 90 years ago.

And it operates differently, too. It has moved from the buggy and the train to the Internet and multimedia technology. We have used radio since the 1930s. We have developed a library of educational video productions since the early 1980s. We have fashioned interactive technologies since the 1990s and even ushered in this century with streaming Internet technology to deliver educational materials in real time.

Other changes have obscured our essence as well. At our inception, most Americans had yet to experience the trappings of modern life that have characterized our standard of living for the past 70 years: electricity, plumbing, automobiles, inoculations and consumer credit. By the 1930s, 90 percent of urban Americans had electricity, but only 10 percent of rural Americans did.

Today, those sorts of distinctions are largely erased. Though there are gaps in services, such as high-speed Internet connectivity in rural areas, they are not as pronounced as the electricity gap in 1930. Today, rural living is largely as modern as urban living.

Extension still plays a role, however, in adapting to modern life. Our training in e-commerce, for instance, is aimed at helping people understand how they can help themselves to the advantages of Internet technology.

Challenges today are largely the same for urban and rural audiences. We are still concerned with health, making wise choices for a successful life and applying knowledge to problems we face. While in the past we delivered knowledge predominantly by meetings and one-on-one consultations, these means are now part of a broader dissemination package.

Still, we know that if you do not like to work with people and do not have a desire to help people, you will not be a successful Extension professional. Many times during the past 90 years, individuals from other institutions or even other parts of the university have wanted a piece of the action in Extension. It was often difficult to explain that Extension is not an organization of fee-for-service consultants. If the primary motivation wasn't to help people, or to better society by helping individuals, the essence of Extension was missing.

This in the end is the heart of Extension. It is people, motivated by a desire to help others, who bring science to the lives of our citizens. This is in essence what will keep us viable and vital for another 90 years, because the Extension approach is something we need more than ever.