Statewide Iowa — This is Iowa State University Extension and Outreach Week — a week in which extension personnel want to tell people what extension is all about.
We talked with Region 1 Extension Education Director Cheryl Heronemus, who tells us things are still not back to normal at the Extension offices.
(as said) “Extension week is looking a little bit different this year as you might expect. Normally we would be hosting things like chamber coffees and having open houses in our offices, but because of COVID we had to kind of put a stop to that yet for this year. Hopefully next year we’ll be back to normal. But some of the things were doing are we’re focusing on some action plans that will actually help people to deal with the COVID situation that we’re in right now. In the four counties that I work with we are focusing on issues related to childcare and also mental health. And if you are in the business world in these four counties, you would know that childcare is an issue because there’s a lot of people that are staying at home with their kids because they either couldn’t go to school or possibly because there just aren’t enough open slots for child care delivery. So we’re trying to focus on some solutions to that problem. And then also trying to do some things to help people deal with mental health issues related to the COVID crisis.”
But, she says, they still have the same goal during extension week — to tell the story of extension.
(as said) “Our goal is to make Iowa strong and there’s a lot of different ways that you can look at that. What we’re working on right now is like we said a lot of things related to mental health and keeping people healthy both, you know… body and mentally. We’ve had to change a lot of things over the past year as you might imagine: a lot of the activities that we would have done last summer related to fairs and so on had to be revamped a bit. Our summer camps became what were called Clover Crates, where kids could actually pick up a crate at the office and there would be instructions for the thing that they would normally be doing at camp, and then they would join with an instructor on YouTube. So we’ve been able to flip a lot of those things. But the thing to remember about extension is that we serve everyone. Our goal is to have a diverse audience and we know that the demographics of our counties are changing all the time. We serve farmers. We serve business and industry. We serve communities with economic development-type projects and then of course youth with our 4-H programs, but also with our Clover Kids… like I said daycare providers and parenting skills and lots and lots of things.”
Heronemus tells us that interestingly enough, the entire extension concept started right in our area. Farmers around Hull wanted to see if research done at Iowa State University in Ames applied to their crops and fields in northwest Iowa — and that’s how the extension concept was born. And Iowa State University Extension was the first in the nation, thanks to those Hull farmers 118 years ago in 1903.
