I feel very privileged and honored to have been invited to present this year’s McDowell Lecture. Thanks to those of you who made it possible. And I cannot think of a better place or time to be sharing these thoughts with an audience of Extension professionals. Why Penn State? Why now? First: Why Penn State? Penn State is the logical place for several reasons:

1) Your state is very diverse, with communities from the most rural to the most urban and a diversity of economic, demographic and other issues driving societal pressures and change.

2) Penn State’s president, Graham Spanier, is leading a transformation of your educational outreach, in a way that is serving as the example for others across the country. There is perhaps no president who understands the land grant philosophy and heritage as well, nor is there another who has articulated so clearly how it must be reinvented to serve the needs of a 21st century society.

3) Graham Spanier is currently serving on our Board of Trustees.

4) I and my colleagues at National 4-H Council have had preliminary discussions with several Penn State faculty and administrators about a collaboration that would lead to both new ways for how faculty work together and how your youth programming impacts communities.

Why now? The Cooperative Extension System is at a crossroads, challenged to be accountable like never before by its traditional clientele and funding sources, dealing with declining appropriated budgets and staffing, and sought out by new publics with different expectations. It is uncertain about its future mission and role. And it seems hidebound by tradition, solidified by the general resistance to rapid, major change often found within the academic community it calls home. As an aside, is Extension’s home really the academic community -- or is it the real communities of people you serve?

If Extension is to change, that change can best come from one or more states leading the way, rather than expecting a top-down, national shift in paradigm. And I don’t know of a state better positioned to be the model for trying out new approaches and leading the change. I was even told that recently by a program officer at the Kellogg Foundation.

In the time available today, I will cover the following:

As I may not be able to cover everything in my oral presentation, I am providing each of you with a copy of my complete text. And I look forward to your comments and questions after sharing my remarks.

I’d like to start my analysis by talking further about land-grant universities. America's land-grant universities are undergoing self-assessments and a refocus of their missions, especially relative to their future "outreach" role. They have begun to recognize the need to more effectively integrate their teaching, research and service, connecting knowledge to addressing the critical needs of America's communities. And they are also learning that they must approach this community work with the community and its citizens being full partners in needs assessment and in the design, implementation, and evaluation of the results of programs addressing these needs. In the process, these universities could once again build a value not unlike they had among many citizens during the early and middle parts of the 20th century, when our country was much more rural and agrarian. In fact, the characteristics of the rural communities of the first half of the 20th century are alive and well in urban communities today -- they are isolated, and many of their residents have low incomes and are struggling for survival.

As part of this examination, University boards, presidents, and other officers are questioning the appropriate mission for their state's Cooperative Extension Service or equivalent (part of the Cooperative Extension System, or simply "Extension") and the best use of its considerable, though sometimes declining, public resources. Extension, as a national system, seems undecided about its focus, including whether or not its broader programming for children, youth and families is a legitimate and integral part of its future; there is considerable variance of emphasis from state to state, especially in terms of whether or not to give major priority to urban and other non-agricultural populations, via what some critics and others resisting change call "social" programs.

Or perhaps it is not so much indecision about focus as it is being blinded by your highest value, that of being a grass roots system. However, is the value "my community needs" or is it "my needs?" It sometimes seems that the focus to keeping the appropriation healthy and thus the jobs of Extension professionals secure is a higher priority than the needs of the communities Extension serves.

Extension's more innovative local (county) staff are often moving away from the traditional "knowledge expert" role to one of being community conveners and facilitators, leading the development of community-wide collaborations that are implementing more comprehensive approaches to addressing critical community issues. The best agents are convening, assessing and bringing innovation to their work from multiple sources -- most of which are non-Extension. And this holistic, community-focused work is increasingly being resourced by private and non-traditional pubic funding sources.

The current outreach status and impact of land-grant universities can be enhanced considerably, and these universities can play an increasingly more vital role in contributing to the solution of problems faced by the increasingly diverse citizens of our nation, if the Cooperative Extension System were to create and actualize a very different vision for the 21st century -- getting out of the box in which it did operate so effectively for much of its past.

For example, community-focused youth development efforts are critical to the future health of our communities. And recent work suggests that these efforts will be most effective and have the most rapid and sustaining positive impact on youth, families and communities if youth are valued and involved as true partners (Lerner, 1995). That is often not the case now.

Land-grant university faculty and staff and the rest of us involved in community youth development and other innovative program initiatives of Extension must recognize and value multiple funding sources, some very unfamiliar to us in the past, and treat them as active, engaged partners rather than passive providers who pay our bills. We must respect not only their investments of resources but their ideas and needs.

You may have found my earlier observations about Extension harsh and thus you perhaps are reacting defensively. Well, I would like to share an assessment of Extension by one of your own, a former chair of ECOP (the Extension Committee on Organization and Policy) and a former state extension director in a state bordering this one. This person was invited to speak to our Board in January of this year about the assets and liabilities of Extension, with emphasis on children, youth and families, in order to help inform their learning as they grappled with a revision our organization’s mission. Remember, this is one of your own saying this, not me!

This former director then said Extension needs a clear, positive alternative vision of the future (in youth development in our case) and advised our Board that National 4-H Council could help provide that. We were also advised to stand back from Extension but not disconnect: "Council cannot wait to move joined at the hip but must move ahead, linking to elements in the System willing to change." I see Penn State as one of those elements, for the reasons I stated earlier, among others.

However, the challenge goes beyond this as well. First, I would add to the "liabilities" Extension’s reluctance to embrace private funding sources. Second, I would ask: is Extension a program/collection of programs or a process? Most would answer that it is a process -- an educational process of connecting knowledge to the needs of people. If so, then should it hold on to programs long-term? Instead, are innovative new programs not developed to meet the needs of particular customer groups and should they not eventually be turned over to those customer groups?

In other words, perhaps 4-H should have been turned over to the agricultural community in the 40's or 50's and Extension’s youth development educators could have focused to developing other programs to meet other audience needs -- instead of trying to stretch one program to meet the needs of all customers, who come from various cultures with sometimes widely different value sets. The recent values conflict around whether or not 4-H clubs can exclude youth based on their sexual orientation is an important example of the problem now faced.

It might be said that Extension made a fatal mistake in the 50's when it decided to put the program name, 4-H, on the professional title of academic staff, thereby institutionalizing the program. Further, most of its hiring, at least until recently, was largely restricted to "graduates" from the program.

It is obvious that land-grant universities are becoming "less public" in terms of the percent of the budget from public sources. Even at the state level, they are often now more appropriately described as "state-assisted" rather than "state-supported." And Extension's public funding is shrinking in real dollar terms and has been for some time. Thus, any real growth in the outreach capability and impact of land-grant universities is going to be resourced by private (and perhaps non-traditional or redirected public) dollars -- nationally, statewide, and locally. The potential for local resources especially should not be overlooked, as local prospective funders are closest to the community's issues -- which are their issues as well. Even corporations, as I will relate later, are shifting from funding national programs and organizations to community-focused initiatives.

The monopolistic control of knowledge by higher education institutions, accompanied by a public perception that these institutions are a special source of wisdom and favored places to enter for learning, is on the verge of major erosion (Lerner and Simon, 1998). The "boundary acid" is the new communications technologies -- and as soon as some universities will allow access to their accreditation remotely in a more substantial way (that is, beyond just a few courses), universities are in for a very rough ride. Classrooms will be empty and sustaining large numbers of tenured faculty positions will no longer be possible. The marketplace will finally play a major role in the vitality and success of academic programs, including research and extension education and any legitimate and valued role in community development. Who would have ever thought that many universities might become ghost towns? Of course, most would never had thought half of our military bases would close either.

While there are a growing number of professionals in Extension who understand that the greatest potential for resource growth is from non-traditional sources, Extension staff in general are not very skillful or successful in acquiring private resources, compared to research faculty or non-profit organizations whose very livelihood depends on the success. (There are, of course, some wonderful exceptions.)

Why is this so? First, the need/incentive was not there until fairly recently (public funding was fairly easy to obtain and sustain). Second, the issue of credibility and objectivity is often raised as a defense for refusing private resources, or not pursuing this kind of funding more aggressively ("We can't let dollars drive programs!" or "We must be objective and not allow ourselves to be influenced by the agendas of private businesses!" are often-heard exclamations when one confronts Extension faculty with the need to seek alternative funding sources).

Extension staff could perhaps afford the luxury of this somewhat arrogant stance if there were sufficient recurring public funds but even public funding sources (bodies of elected officials) are now demanding a new accountability and relevance, and the old backroom lobbying is less and less effective.

And all funding sources, both public and private, demand a role in the design, implementation and evaluation of the proposed research or education project. This demand literally sends shivers up the spines of many university faculty -- that someone on the outside, not credentialed in their disciplinary wisdom, should have a say in what they do or what value it might have. Unless Extension faculty are willing to enter true partnerships with funders, acknowledging that the funders have as much say as they do in the co-creation of a response to an issue of mutual interest, they will have fewer and fewer resources to support their education-driven social action for changing and saving kids' lives or otherwise impacting the lives of Americans.

Also, while it is important to make sure that Extension programs are undergirded by sound research, that is generally not the most critical factor in the eyes of potential funders -- it surely is not with the ones we work with. Thus, university faculty must overcome an arrogance growing out of the bill of goods we (that is, the Cooperative Extension System) have sold ourselves over the years -- to the point that it has become one of our sacred articles of faith in land grant universities. That is, we have argued for the uniqueness of our Extension programs, being research based, compared to other agencies and organizations that provide education programs for children, youth, and families. This research base is only partially true, and perhaps less true for 4-H/youth development than for family living; but in both cases, it is less so than for agricultural extension programming. I say this having been director of a state agricultural experiment station that invests more in children, youth, and family research than most any other in the U.S., and still seeing it far short of what would be close to the relative need or fair share, and having been a university vice president responsible for both Extension and research, where I saw all too many youth and family programs not based on research findings -- neither ours nor anyone else's. The research is out there, but often not in land-grant universities (at least not in the agricultural related units) and often not heavily accessed by many of the 4-H youth development staff. At Penn State, there are some wonderful resources in Human Development across the campus (your President was at one time one of those faculty resources, and he still is -- but with severe time limitations), but I don’t know to what extent they are being accessed to inform and update Extension’s youth development programming.

In my experience, the most critical research, in the eyes of funders, is documentation and evaluation research -- to document what you did and how you did it and to show that what you tried worked and is worth funding again -- whether or not your initial effort was based on "sound research." Further, private sector funders do not generally want to fund basic research, or even applied research to develop the youth development experience or other Extension educational programs. Increasingly, they are saying the research has been done, or it must have been done, and they want to support your best idea for an action program, coupled with a community-focused, research-based evaluation to show whether or not it worked. At the same time, if you simply argue that they should support programs like 4-H that have been around a long time and that we know work -- "Just look at the wonderful kids coming out of it" -- that is not enough.

There has been a dramatic shift in funding in the past two decades, especially over the past 7 to 10 years, in our work of resourcing 4-H youth development programs: from 4-H alumni in key roles as corporate CEO's making phone calls to other CEO's, to contribution departments, to very focused professionals investing "their" resources, with the expectation of measurable return, around corporate strategies (from entitlement to enlightened self interest to proven value). The same shift has occurred in public funding: from back room confabs with legislative and congressional committee chairs (coupled perhaps with a campaign contribution, private favor, or public recognition) to lobbying the whole committee with visits, letter writing, and phone calls, to being challenged with questions of impact and value (just consider the Government Performance Review, or its equivalent in various states).

While every corporation and foundation is different, and I could relate many stories from the past year alone, we are finding these common threads among private sector funding prospects:

The winds and rain of societal change are causing many challenges and pressures for Extension, several of which I have already mentioned. To quote your University’s president, "In the shifting sands of societal needs, the challenges of youth, families, and communities are increasingly emerging as critical to our nation’s future" (Spanier and Crowe, 1998). Land-grant universities have an enormous opportunity (and, some would say, responsibility) to strengthen their integration and focus to be of greater benefit to America's communities. It will require different ways of doing business, fully engaging the citizens in the process of a co-learning partnership. It will require paradigm shifts in these academic institutions. It will need to be funded by new, non-traditional partners and their resources. And a transformed Cooperative Extension System could play a key leadership role in bringing broad and effective outreach into a balance to positively impact community issues in more substantial ways.

Extension has lived most of its existence in a "welfare state." Another way of saying this is that Extension has been unduly dependent on the public dole -- with almost all of its resources coming from tax dollars. And, at least until recently, it was not required to demonstrate clear accountability and measures of impact in order to continue the funding. Rather, a political process was used to sustain the funding.

However, Extension’s traditional power base has lost much of its clout, and the funding is eroding. Further, public funds are getting squeezed in all directions, so even with a stronger political support base, it may well be impossible to prevent the erosion.

What is the answer? I suggest it is to become much more entrepreneurial. In fact, there are numerous examples where local Extension staff are doing just that in various locations across the country. I know of a county extension director in California who has established an $20 million trust fund to support his innovative local Extension work, making him much less dependent on appropriated funds and the politics associated therewith. And I know of a county 4-H agent in a very rural county in the hills of western North Carolina who had four staff on soft money.

These entrepreneurial approaches are exactly what has made Extension’s primary competitors more successful in this changing world. There are enormous resources available to support much of the work of Extension, if you can articulate the need and measure and demonstrate the impact. Yes, you will not have the same continuity of funding and that can be a challenge; however, it is also a blessing in disguise. You will be forced to measure your impact and outcomes like never before, and that can only be an asset for you with all funding partners, and with your customers. And, if tenure were not a barrier, you could make staffing changes based on productivity, impact and relevance.

My vision for the Cooperative Extension System of the 21st century is that of an adaptive educational organization, without tenure for its staff, supported by a broad diversity of public and private financial resources, highly valued by individuals, families, and communities as being critical for the community's citizens to both make a living and live a quality life, and with great internal flexibility and the ability to respond quickly in focusing and redirecting its resources to current or anticipated future societal issues and problems. The issues and problems will be identified by the people, at the local level; this will empower these citizens and build their capacity for leadership. In being the neutral convener, bringing people together to learn how to address problems, access multiple resources and solve the problems, Extension will be seen as the premier organization providing learning opportunities, from prenatal to adulthood, and lifelong, in the context of family and community. It will be a key convener, collaboration-builder or partner, more often than the acknowledged knowledge expert, in facilitating learning-based community solutions to local problems and issues. And it will organize itself to function in a chaordic (Hock, 1995) model, instead of the hierarchical command and control model of the past.

One assumption that some would make for this vision to be actualized is that Extension disconnect from the U.S. Department of Agriculture at the federal level -- or at least from such a heavy, unilateral dependence on this one federal agency. There is still need for an agricultural extension organization, but continuing to shoe-horn a legitimate and growing broader need into the banner of agriculture and the specific needs of farmers and their agricultural production systems may be stifling the institution, making any move towards the vision above an impossibility, except perhaps in a few isolated local situations and even fewer states. Maintaining the paradigm may also be doing a disservice to farmers, as their issues often do not receive the dedicated and sharp focus they need. And it may be constraining the broad resources of the land-grant universities from being brought to bear on community needs in a collaborative way.

Alternatively, the Cooperative Extension System could refocus entirely on agricultural production, processing and marketing, and the land grant and urban universities could develop a new outreach model to serve other human and community needs. Politics and changing public sentiment suggest that either of the two alternatives are more likely than the current status quo for the Cooperative Extension System.

Before I close, I would like to divert and focus some comments to youth, specifically to the power of youth and to the future youth development work of Extension. (I may not have time to cover this in my oral presentation, but I want at least to include it in this text. Consider it a "commercial" message if you will, but I believe it has significant implications for the future of Extension’s youth development work.)

America's communities are on a roller coaster - in the wrong direction - regarding the positive development of their youth as well as the capacity of these communities to assure their future health and viability (Lerner, 1995). We must reverse a national trend of devaluing, punishing, separating, disenfranchising and alienating our young people. And critical issues affecting both youth and their communities are coming at them at an increasing pace.

The full engagement of youth -- all youth -- in addressing their issues as well as the community's issues can reverse this roller coaster and be a major catalyst to the quality and pace of positive community development. Further, dramatically different and more inclusive processes must be used to develop these self-sustaining, learning communities. And we must scale up from successful model systems to build effective capacity in large numbers of communities -- work that land-grant universities with a broad, integrated community-collaborative outreach commitment can and should do.

Land-grant universities could and should lead the interconnection and integration of the learnings and practices of the youth development field with those of the community development field into a holistic approach called community youth development. Via this approach, each community will be prepared to provide better support for its young people -- their development, their academic achievement, and their community participation; young people will have the skills as facilitative leaders to engage community dialogue and issue resolution, while acquiring critical life skills; each community will benefit from the stronger, sustained engagement of young people in the resolution of key issues; and the community will become the method/focus of the engagement and, thus, the developmental tool/process, on an ongoing basis. Finally, the communities become ongoing laboratories for university research and sources of the universities' future students and scholars.

Every young person in a community must have access to a complete bank of developmental assets to be an engaged community citizen and become a resilient, contributing adult. Developing a critical mass of youth in each community with access to these assets and teaching them facilitative action and other civic process skills creates for the community a human resource that could massively accelerate the pace of community development and catalyze positive change. Youth are impatient, and they do not carry the baggage and barriers that adults harbor.

Why is it so important to be inclusive and engage and involve all youth? So that communities will be inclusive, viable and liveable. All youth have value and all have ideas and solutions to offer. Everyone, youth as well as adults, are leaders in their own lives, their family, and their community, and our focus should be to nourish their leadership development through engaging them in legitimate community-focused leadership work. All youth can benefit from such engagement in partnership with adults.

And our civil society and nation are at risk, requiring that we learn how to work together -- with all different segments, including ages, integrated, with cross-society access -- if we are to preserve our visioned societal outcomes. Finally, for community youth development to work, strategically, the community must believe it is for all youth -- or it will not happen.

Youth feel they can make a real difference in addressing their issues, which are often the community's issues as well, by working in partnership with adults in their communities -- if only adults would respect and value them and give them a chance. They want to and can be part of the solution, rather than be labeled as the problem. They can literally intervene in their own development.

Our communities and our nation need to hear the voice of youth, speaking out about the actions they are taking to solving critical issues in their lives and communities. There are voices from all other age groups in our society and, yes, there are many speaking out for youth or on behalf of youth. But where is the voice of youth?

Will Extension change at the pace necessary to be of as much relevance in the first decade of the 21st century as it was during the first and middle decades of the 20th century? I am curious enough to stick around and find out, as the next several years unfold. And our non-profit will do what we can to seed, catalyze and support serious efforts in this direction.

Specifically regarding young people, perhaps we can someday assure that each community will have available the maximum number of positive youth development assets for its youth and families and the resulting strengthened human resources will create and sustain a new level positive community change. And all youth will have hope for a positive future. And Extension will have been a major player in making this possible. Thank you for your attention. I look forward to your questions and our dialogue.

Hock, D. W. (1995). The Chaordic Organization: Out of Control and Into Order. World Business Academy Perspectives, 9(1), 5-18.

Lerner, R. M. (1995). America's Youth In Crisis: Challenges and Options for Programs and Policies. Thousand Oaks: SAGE, 147 pp.

Lerner, R. M. & L.K. Simon (1998). University-Community Collaborations for the Twenty-First Century: Outreach Scholarship for Youth and Families. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 515 pp.

Spanier, G.B. & M. B. Crowe (1998). Marshaling the Forces of the Land-Grant University to Promote Human Development. IN: Lerner and Simon (1998), above, pp. 73-89.