Hi, I am Jenny Bozella from the University of Missouri,
and this is the second video in a series on health and outreach partnerships and public libraries.
Denise, can you introduce yourself?
Hello, I'm Denise Adkins, and I am happy to participate in this second video and we're here interviewing Dr Marshall Stewart,
the vice chancellor for extension and engagement and the University of Missouri system of Chief Engagement Officer.
So first off, I wanted to mention the longevity of partnerships between public libraries and extension services.
I found one publication from 1890 to about local public libraries and their relation
to university extension offers a link to that that's from New York extension.
So that said, public libraries and university extension have definitely both evolved since 1892.
So we're going to focus on current partnerships. Denise, you want kick us off here.
All right, so Dr. Stewart, can you tell us about the role of extension generally in the United States and then more specifically in Missouri?
Well, the and Jenny, it's good to be with you today to talk a little bit about extension and how it's evolved here in Missouri.
Early extension grew out of the moral act of 1862. If you go back far enough in history, the moral act was signed by Abraham Lincoln 1862,
and it was the first time that ever been a compact or relationship in any formal way between higher education.
The federal government is named a moral act because it was named after just
a moral who was a senator for Vermont and just a moral as an industrialist.
Part of the what would be called the well-to-do of that time. Abraham Lincoln.
Obviously, we know his story from poverty up to the presidency,
and they knew that at that time in this country, there was a need to bring access to higher education.
So you really have to go back to Lincoln's time to really understand extension, because that's where it began.
It was the first time that this thing we call the Land Grant University was established.
The Land Grant University was basically out of the moral act where they so public lands gave those to
the universities to really focus all opportunities of education for the sons and daughters of toil.
And that's the exact language that came out of that. Those were the agrarian primary, the agrarian class of society, the farmers,
the folks that lived in rural areas in particular to have a chance to go into higher education.
Because prior to that, in order to get higher education access, which speaks to public libraries, eventually you had to have certain education.
You had to be from a certain class of of of the of society.
And so it was an opportunity to begin to open up that what we would call today the middle class
it was to create a middle class to bring people from sort of the underserved population,
which are primarily rural and scattered in the middle of a civil war, no less in 1862.
To bring them up into higher education, allow them the opportunity to build what we today call the middle class.
Now you fast forward that as the university continued to grow and universities at the University of Missouri here in Missouri,
the state chose to put the land grant inside of the University of Missouri.
And so the institution here, for instance, was established in eighteen thirty nine.
So sixty two, they said, we're going to make you the land grant and some other states.
I'll use a state like where I'm from in North Carolina. They chose not to put it inside you and see Chapel Hill, which was established.
They set aside to establish NC State University as a land grant.
And it's important to note that because of the extension program, extension service extension outreach only exists in the land grant system,
so you will not find it in other institutions of public, higher education or private institutions.
So that's where it began, that's where it was started. So in every state, you look for that land grant university,
be it Purdue in Indiana or be at Michigan State or be at Ohio State, wherever that land grant is.
That's where extension is going to be. Now, as you move into the late eighteen hundreds,
what you find is there's an effort to extend knowledge out to more of the folks who didn't get a chance, the people.
They didn't get a chance to come to the university.
How do you take the university to the and out of that came something called agricultural experiment stations,
agricultural experiment stations or what we call today, AG Research Farms.
You'll find it scattered all over the state of Missouri that they found was not enough because you still had to go to a location.
So in 1914 was when it was federalized.
But you spoke earlier, a few minutes ago, Jenny, that there were pieces of extension beginning to permeate in the late eighteen hundreds.
Well, they were doing was sending people out to communities to work with communities, to say, What's your issue in agriculture and rural communities?
How can we at the university solve that, bring a solution and then extend that?
That's extension, extend that into community. That's the extension part of it.
So again, if you fast forward legislation was passed in 1914, the Smith Labor Act,
which is federalized it, which put extension across the entire United States and over 3000 counties.
We have county partnerships with all 114 counties here in Missouri, plus the city of St. Louis.
And that was again early. Nineteen hundred nineteen fourteen and a few years thereafter that began to take shape.
And so out of that became what we know as today, IMU extension in Missouri.
It also is what we've seen. We talk about extension and engagement. It is also broadened out historically was very much in agriculture for h.
Some things that people in our communities would definitely understand nutrition, education, career, development, education.
We have extension folks across the state doing that business development, another area we touch on.
But how about when engagement came along? It was like, how do we engage the full university?
So today at the University of Missouri, we have partnerships over the last five years, for instance, we've built.
Partnerships with every department, every college, every school here we have,
every division is in some way connected with our unit here as we engage universe.
You can go to journalism and you can find them doing outreach and engagement, connecting to extension.
You go to the business school and you'll see it. I can show you examples of it in the College of Medicine School of Nursing.
There are examples now populated all the way across the university because as Elaine Grant,
we believe at the University of Missouri in particular that we should extend the university, we should.
We're here to serve part of our ethics service to others,
just like it would be in the public library system or as you guys work in that area of library is to serve a public need.
And so that takes you forward. We also had one last piece.
I'll leave you with is over the last five years,
we've also connected the other three universities of the University of Missouri system Missouri S.A. and you have Casey to the extension system.
So if there's knowledge coming out of S.A. that could help in northern Missouri community, we can pull that in the community through extension.
It's a very unique model. You will not see this in other states.
We're very proud of what we've done here.
We've got a lot of great people work to make that happen, but that gives you sort of the big picture overview of extension.
We obviously partner with libraries and many others and glad to take further questions you may have about how that looks as well.
Thank you so much.
Yeah, you touched on a lot of different partnerships that you have around the university and you mentioned medicine and nursing and the can you.
Can you talk about some of the maybe some specific projects that you've had that concentrate on health?
Yes. When it comes to the health arena, obviously, if you look at the state of Missouri,
like many other states, there's tremendous need in the health arena.
We saw that really become poignant, mirroring COVID 19 and the pandemic.
I became more heightened awareness around it. But if you go pre, pre-pandemic, Missouri ranks somewhere between 40 second,
40 third and fiftieth in about every health indicator, which is not where you want to be.
So what we began to do was take a hard look at that data and say, what can we do to improve that?
So if you look at, for instance, water health on negatives in the state was opioid use.
We have done a lot of work with our partners in the College of Medicine, School of Nursing Health Professions,
also our partners at Um Casey to bring opioid education, how to stop opioid use in rural communities.
That's one example that we're working in right now.
We've got another initiative that in fact, I'm going to be speaking on tomorrow and another meeting about rural mental health.
Rural mental health is a incredibly important issue.
We don't have the mental health opportunities for people to get help in those rural communities, oftentimes.
So we're working closely between IMU Extension, the Department of Psychology here at Arts and Sciences,
as well as our partners at unsought to bring rural mental health content into those communities to provide counseling.
We've got opportunities where some communities use an app to go online or individual can if the care.
So those began to give you some examples of where we're beginning to touch in this space.
Another thing we're looking at right now is working with our next gen enterprise, our precision medicine,
precision health enterprise here on campus to really help faculty researchers go in and do very targeted research where there are cancer clusters.
For instance, in a community, we have IMU extension has the buy in locally.
They know us in the community because our people are embedded there. They may not know a researcher for a Mamu.
So we're working on a plan that will enable us to bring our brand and bring that,
that good feeling that people have that brand identity people have for IMU extension locally.
Together with that high level researcher to do community population health research with the community.
So I just think there's a lot of opportunities.
Again, I'm giving you a couple examples and things we're working on right now that will take shape over the next few months.
So that really there are some things that you said in there that make me think of our projects.
Public libraries often. You know, one of the places where people do go for health information and so can you.
Can you imagine how some of those projects you mentioned could be located?
If you're looking for a space, I mean, a public library might be a really good.
That might be a good opportunity. Have you ever you ever work with public libraries and that kind of capacity?
Yeah. Locally, our field faculty, we have faculty all over the state that work in extension in various disciplines,
and they oftentimes interact with community based libraries and cities and small municipalities, et cetera.
One of the things that's really interesting is to go back and look historically,
if you look at many places in the country, the library in a community was actually started.
By extension, people saw a need for an extension got organized.
We did the same thing in rural electric, the rural electricity, when it was being expanded around the country.
Same thing with hospitals.
Extension has played a vital role in not only working together today, but helping establishing those infrastructures in communities.
Because we are convener, we bring people together, we bring knowledge of how to do it.
So if you go historically, there's an opportunity.
But also if you fast forward to the day, there would be great opportunity because as you said, today, we have libraries.
They are a public entity. They have public space for all kinds of educational programs and many of our communities.
Our faculty will use our public spaces, public spaces in a library to do that.
We also find opportunities. For instance, we're working very closely with in certain areas of the state.
We've done some work around broadband access because sometimes that lab, that library is a public space where you can get access when there,
maybe the person doesn't have it and maybe we're doing training programs on how to use broadband.
We're very involved in the broadband expansion work at the state.
And so there's a lot of synergy between the public library space as a public good and doing something
bigger than ourselves and the work we do an extension and engagement as an outreach of the university.
You see a lot of synergy happen there, whether it's in health, broadband or other kinds of educational programs.
I mean, there's really no limit as to how those partnerships can take place.
But the key is for us not to dictate. Maybe we share some ideas of how you can do it.
But those local people coming together, convening, figuring out, Hey,
here's how we can leverage space we have for the betterment of people in our community.
Thank you. That actually reminds me of a couple of projects I'm working on now where we are
working with the Missouri Department of Education and Department of Special Education,
and we were talking with first steps providers,
the people who go out and are direct service providers talking about, Well, how do you use public libraries?
And they were talking about and working in public libraries do for us.
But it occurs to me that extension has been the missing piece of this that we have a lot of a lot of our direct service providers saying,
Well, I didn't know what the library offered in the library, saying I don't know what people need.
And this is seems like exactly where extension would come in to say, we've collected these needs.
We have the resources. This is how we fit together.
So that sounds like a wonderful opportunity for us to actually join forces to make our state better.
Yes, and we would we would welcome that opportunity. Obviously,
one of the things that we have as a sort of a strategic advantage is we are constantly involved in the work of what we call needs assessment.
We can if folks want to know more about that, they can go to all things Missouri dot org.
It's a public site we created five years ago. It's where all data points in the state and nationally.
Some sort of secondary data from around the country that relates to Missouri all comes into that.
Twenty four seven, it's about thirty one thirty two thousand streams of data on any given second that's going in there.
You can map things, you can look at economic issues, you look at education, you can do comparative analysis.
It's a great tool. It's a public source. We put it out there for the public. There's no charge for it.
But what what that does that to get to your question, that's a needs assessment driven thing.
So we are constantly looking at needs and so that intersection between what the libraries are trying to do,
trying to build those kind of partnerships to provide good work for community and in partnership with community.
That's right on top of what we do. So we welcome the opportunity to partner.
We'd encourage your colleagues in the libraries across Missouri as well as our colleagues and extension.
If you don't know each other, you need to get to know each other because this is a great opportunity to
synergize around things that could really be of great service to the community.
Just Serbian. So how does what's a good method for getting in touch with extension if I was a librarian working at Pearl Missouri?
Well, in every single county there is a county extension office. Typically, it's in the county seat.
Sometimes it's in the courthouse or the courthouse square. Not always, but somewhere in that area.
If you basically go to IMU extension dot org, I'll go to any extension edu rather.
Excuse me, just do a Google there. You can put in any county and you can see who the contact person is.
They're easy to find, easy to navigate. You've also got it.
So that's that locally, that's how you best do it. Obviously, people are welcome to call our office here at the University of Missouri.
I'm easy to find probably the most public facing people this university has, and we certainly can help direct you as well.
But the key is as local relationships as again, every county in the state of Missouri has.
That presence of extension is something we're very proud of.
It's made possible by the county partnership that we have at our county extension councils.
Our county commissioners all make that possible. And we're very grateful for that.
So we encourage folks go online. Look, if you can't find it safely, contact us.
So we won't have to direct you where we can get you the assistance and the partnership that you need.
So I have one real quick last question if obviously we're in Missouri, but if I was in a state,
another state with a land grant university with extension, would it be set up similarly or is there a different structure in each state?
That's a great question. Every state has land grant universities.
All 50 states have. In fact, in our state, in some states you have as many as two.
Our state would be one. Lincoln University is a land grant. It was established in 1890.
Different act, as you might expect of that era that looked into the HBCU world of the South.
So in the southern U.S., you will find two land grants typically charter one, specifically HBCU, one typically of 1862 version.
So but if you were to go to any state to your question, if you were to go to Kansas,
Illinois or anywhere, if you put an Illinois extension in Kansas State Extension,
if you go and look at Nebraska extension, our state extension, you are to put that in a Google search bar that all comes up.
Every single state has it all the way to Vermont, Maine, Washington, Washington state.
I mean, you go anywhere in the country. The other neat thing about the land grant system, if you think about it that way is we're all connected.
So we may we may have certain areas of expertize that we definitely have grown in and we're very good at.
There may be something you're looking for that another state has.
You might think, Well, I wonder what they do at Texas A&M or blank Texas A&M as a land grant.
They definitely they may have the resource you're looking for.
So we do share a lot of stuff across borders because information content doesn't stop at our borders.
Those are things we set in place many years ago. Just like County County Lines, state lines are the same way.
And so we do want to encourage our folks if you're in some other part of the country for another state or what have you.
We encourage you to go to your extension a group there with your at university to learn from them as well.
Well, thank you. Those are all the questions that we have. Did you have anything done to follow up with?
Well, I don't know. It's a follow up, but I'll say thank you very much for the opportunity.
One of the things you learn about extension is it's all based on partnership is the only way it works.
It's a partnership. Again, as I said really earlier, it's between the federal government and the state and the states and the counties.
Everything we exist on is around partnerships. We partner with state agencies, we partner with on campus agencies like libraries.
We work every unit on campus as well as public libraries out in the state.
So we are constantly seeking looking for connecting with various partners.
And if anyone's watching this thinking, hey, I wonder if they'd be interested in partnering with us on blank, whatever blank is.
It doesn't hurt to ask. Sometimes we can, as it does, we can't. Typically, if we can't for some reason, or it's not the right time for us,
we are very adept at finding a good partner for you because we do know where partners are and we have literally thousands of them on any given day,
so we welcome the opportunity to do that. And again, it's been a delight to be with you today.
Thank you so much. Yes, indeed. Thank you.
That has been a great look at the way the value of partnerships in making health information available to all of our citizens.
So thanks so much.