Advisory Leader’s Roles with the Extension Plan of Work Ralph Prince, Advisory Leadership Coordinator University of Kentucky Cooperative Extension Service

The Four Year Plan of Work Cooperative Extension agents with the aid of advisory groups and other community members develop a Four Year Plan of Work followed by annual updates.

Why a Plan of Work? Extension is a public agency supported primarily by public (tax) dollars. To demonstrate accountability for our time and resources allocated to Kentucky Cooperative Extension, we need to show that our actions are planned and deliberate. The Plan of Work is our “contract with the community” - a display of locally identified issues and our plans to address them. BUT...

Why bother? The Plan of Work is like the rudder for our ship… without a rudder, we would wander aimlessly without a course or deliberate direction…

The Plan of Work guides our program in the direction identified by local leaders

The Plan of Work helps us find a proper balance between Service and Education Service Education

The Plan of Work serves as a guide to the proper and appropriate use of resources.

The Plan of Work makes our efforts the people’s program

To be effective in our efforts, we need to: discover the issues affecting the people of our county that we can address through educational programs. Those are the nuggets we must search for!

We call this Four Year Plan of Work effort and we have a process for it and you have a role in it!

Four Key Steps Where Advisory Leaders are involved in the POW Process Developing Linkages with the Public Planning—assessing, prioritizing, and designing Implementation of plans Evaluation—measuring program results

Step One: Developing Linkages with the Public—Help us Connect Are our advisory groups’ membership where they need to be? Have we identified others in our community and identified ways to seek input from them? Are we clear about our mission in program planning?

Step Two: Planning We will ask you to help us with: Situation Analysis—what are the issues? Identifying Program Opportunities—what do our investigations say? Priority Setting—which issues should we address at this time? Program Design—what is our strategy for addressing these?

Step Three: Program Implementation Roles Advisory Members will help with: Resource Management Program Management –humans, tasks, fiscal matters, risks Marketing—mail, media, community postings Collaboration

Step Four: Program Evaluation We will need your help in establishing criteria, collecting evidence, making judgments and communicating findings Evaluation—value or worth of the program Interpretation—what does it mean Communication—who needs to know

IN CONCLUSION Steps to the Process of the POW Developing Linkages with the Public Planning Implementation Evaluation