Council July Meeting [8:04-13:06]

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Good afternoon. I'm Rebecca Payne. I'm the interim county extension director while our boy chief educator slash county extension director is on maternity leave. So hopefully you'll get used to seeing my face here for the next couple of months. I'm just here tonight to give you an update on the things that we're working on in extension for the second quarter. So you know, I just passed that out. Obviously you haven't had a chance to read it. But hopefully you will take a look at it at some point when you have the time. We feel like we have a lot of good things going on. And we're really happy to be sharing with you all that we've been up to. And so just in the last three months alone. We've had outreach and direct education to over 500 ones county residents. So we feel really proud about that number. And these are opportunities that we're giving these folks for direct education and all kinds of skills and resources across a variety of program areas. So as a reminder, extension is made up of 4-H and get development. That's one program area. And there's helping human sciences. That's just another one. There's agonatural resources. And then there's community development. So all of those program areas have their own sort of focus on particular things. However, there's a lot of opportunity for them to overlap and complement one another. So we're a great team over there trying to do the best for all of the people that we get the pleasure of interacting with. So just going to take a second to go over some of the specific accomplishments out of our community wellness program. Our community wellness coordinator was able to forge a partnership with Orange County Feet Trust and Glick Land Prophees to fund a mobile farm stand. Perhaps some of you saw it. This was hosted in June and the mobile farm stand was stationed here in Bedford. And we have 49 residents participate in that. And the grant funding and coordinated efforts enabled the purchasing of fresh fruit with grant support averaging $13.72 per person. So that was a nice partnership. That was a success. The nutrition education program advisor was very busy. The spring wrapping up in classroom programs. So she taught 19 lessons that covered or reached 326 students. She did five specific lessons out of our eSmart Move More program. And she conducted two lessons through our Learn, Grow, Eat, and Go curriculum. And these are programs that provide essential health and nutrition education to elementary students. And a lot of these kids are not receiving this formal health instruction during school. So this is supplementary. The PE side of it is typically covered, but this is more towards food nutrition and just developing lifelong skills around nutrition and health related topics. Coming out of our 4-H in Youth Development program, we had a very successful 4-H Mini Day Camp this year. We had 32 youth grades K through 2 who participated. This is a 2-day camp where they had hands-on learning opportunities covering topics from science to healthy living, to civic engagement, to some horse. So it was a very fun opportunity for our kids, but most impressive to me is that we had 16 amazing team counselors who came and showed up and led the sessions. And so talk about future leaders. It was just a really nice opportunity for our youth to be involved in that way. And then coming from the Health and Human Sciences program, I've been busy working alongside my colleagues at the state level to develop what we're calling a digital ambassador volunteer program. And the goal here is to train a base of volunteers who can turn around and educate across subject matters related to digital literacy.