Evelyn Crayton Named Assistant Director

“We are very pleased to have Dr. Evelyn Crayton as the new assistant director for family and community programs,” said Dr. Sam Fowler, Extension associate director, rural and traditional programs. “Evelyn has a wealth of experience in many areas of family programs and also has been extensively involved in several areas of community programs. She is internationally recognized for her work in both nutrition and health. We feel that Dr. Crayton will be able to provide very effective leadership for both family and community programs and that both of these important areas will continue to be part of our core programs in Extension.”

An Extension foods and nutrition specialist, Crayton brings almost 30 years of Extension experience to the position. She began her Extension career as a foods and nutrition specialist at Tuskegee Institute in1973, and she has been an Extension foods and nutrition specialist at Auburn since 1977. A registered and licensed dietitian, Crayton was a full professor in the department of nutrition and food sciences at Auburn.

Crayton says she has been preparing for this position her entire life. She said Extension 4-H and home economics agents made positive impressions on her life as a child in Louisiana. Making visits to her home and school, the agents not only taught her and her family ways to improve their lives at home and on the farm, but they also instilled in her the importance of helping others.

“Seeing how those agents reached out to us and other families in my community made a lasting impression upon my life. I knew then I wanted to have a career that would help people improve their quality of life.”

Her areas of responsibility as Extension assistant director for family and community programs will include food safety, nutrition and health, children, youth and families, community resource and economic development and consumer science and resource management.

“Combining family and community programs under one assistant director is a natural marriage,” Crayton said. “The two programs fit perfectly together because if you have healthy people you can have healthy communities. That’s what we are going to be about. “

She said she hopes to bring consumer sciences to the forefront again so that families in Alabama will look to Extension for information and education.

“I want to bring a new awareness to this generation that Extension is here for them,” Crayton said. “From pregnancy to birth, through the school years, to adulthood, through marriages, divorces, middle-age crises and the senior adult years, Extension is here to help improve the quality of life. Extension has something to offer in every phase of one’s life cycle.”

In her new position she will no longer function as a foods and nutrition specialist but will focus on every aspect of family life.

“This is the kind of model I came out of, one where we weren’t so specialized and everybody met the needs of the family,” Crayton said. “With today’s budget cuts and downsizing, I see us returning to that model. We will have people with specialized training working in various interdisciplinary programs to help meet the needs of the family. And if we can’t help them, we will direct them to people who can.”

“Networking is one of the greatest tools we have in Extension,” she added. “We have an infrastructure already in place, and I know it works. I’ve seen it work in three different areas of Extension -- the 1890 program, the 1862 program and the 1994 program, which works with Native Americans.”

Crayton says she will not be a person who just sits behind a desk. “I will be out there among the people involved in our programs. The vision comes from the people we serve. Their needs will determine our programs’ focus.

A native of Jones in Morehouse Parish, La., Crayton graduated in 1968 from Grambling State University with a bachelor’s degree in institutional management. She completed requirements for her dietetics license in 1969 and earned her master’s degree in dietetics in 1972 from St. Louis University. She earned her doctorate. in vocational and adult education from Auburn University in 1991. She also spent five years working as a therapeutic dietitian in hospitals in St. Louis.

Crayton is married to John Crayton and they have three children. Her son Kareem graduated from Harvard College with a Bachelor of Arts degree in government, and he earned his doctorate and juris doctor from Stanford University. Her daughter Eboni is a Sloan Scholarship doctoral candidate at City University of New York, majoring in biomedical engineering. Her youngest son MaKieth is a senior at Alabama A&M University and is majoring in plant science.

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