EXTENSION

As Executive Director of CIRED, which is part of Outreach and International Affairs at Virginia Tech, in a sense all that I do every day is about outreach and extension. Here, I share a few more specific ways in which I've engaged with extension and outreach over the years. 

As an Extension Specialist at Virginia Tech (2013-2022), I worked closely with agents, specialists, and administrators in the Virginia Cooperative Extension (VCE) system on issues of evaluation and evaluation capacity. The overarching goal that guided my Extension work was to help foster a culture of evaluation within VCE, whereby a critical mass of VCE professionals have the knowledge, skills, and attitudes necessary for wide-spread, sustained, and high-quality evaluation across the system. Achieving this goal required building on existing strengths, listening to and learning from the needs of diverse stakeholders pertaining to evaluation, and crafting a system of evaluation capacity building (ECB) and technical assistance that meets VCE’s needs. Specifically, I endeavored to help establish and facilitate a monitoring and evaluation system that supports continuous learning, adaptive management for program improvement, and accountability. I worked towards an evaluation system in VCE that leads the nation and is a benchmark for success within the fields of extension evaluation and ECB. 

In my Extension and outreach work with USAID/ERA and Feed the Future Senegal Youth in Agriculture, my main extension goal was to help instill, in a contextually-appropriate way, the land grant and Cooperative Extension mission into Senegalese agricultural education, training, research, and outreach institutions. Some exciting ways in which we are doing so include: (1) launching a 4-H Positive Youth Development program based at Senegalese universities, focusing on fostering life skills as well as youth entrepreneurship in agriculture; (2) facilitating a partnership between food science faculty and students and women's economic empowerment groups working in value-added processing of local foods; and (3) supporting multi-institutional, interdisciplinary applied research and extension platforms on issues such as climate smart production of staple crops (e.g., growing rice and millet in salty soils) and development of new value chains (e.g., sweet corn). A 'pathway model' of our theory of change is available here. 

Also, in terms of useful Extension resources, check out this packet of materials and set of informative videos on evaluative thinking to which I contributed, put together by Catholic Relief Services:

• Sharrock, G., Buckley, J., & Archibald, T. (2017). Evaluative Thinking Facilitator’s Guide. [A volume of 9 packets of activities focused on Identifying Assumptions, Seeking Evidence, and Taking Action]. Catholic Relief Services. Retrieved from https://www.crs.org/our-work-overseas/how-we-work/our-commitment-monitoring-evaluation-accountability-and-learning-meal