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Assembly of Extension Program Leaders Executive Committee

Conference Call (1/27/2006 )

Participants: Jack Thigpen, Pete Granger, Ralph Rayburn, Jim Hurley, Frank Lichtkoppler, Nancy Balcom

Absent: Paula Cullenberg

Assembly Committees

• Nominations: As Past Chair, Ralph will replace Bill DuPaul as the EXCOM rep of the committee. No activity
• Beltway Brown Bag Seminars: The 6 th seminar will be held the week of March 13 th (probably 14 th and 15 th); topic is seabird bycatch. Pete Granger will attend with speakers Ed Melvin ( Washington) and Torie Baker ( Alaska). Jamie Krauk is making arrangements; Pete will ask Jamie to check with Lauren Batte, NOAA Congressional Affairs, to determine if there is any interest from the Hill to hear about this topic, given the upcoming Magnuson Act reauthorization.

Ralph is looking to step down as Chair of this committee. Need to determine who the EXCOM liaison will be also. Ralph will email the EXCOM the brown bag guidelines for reference.

• Awards: The Awards Committee currently consists of Jim Hurley and Peter Granger. The Wick Visionary Career Leadership Awards will be awarded during the May meeting, and we need to get the nomination process going. Jim reviewed the previous criteria (same for both the for Programming and Administration), and after discussion, it was determined to leave the criteria as they stand, and suggest that up to three letters of support accompany the nomination, one from supervision, co-worker, and constituent. Jim also emailed the EXCOM a list of previous awardees, but it is incomplete. (It was noted that the information on the Assembly’s web page regarding the awards and also the listing of program leaders is outdated and needs to be updated; Nancy will address this with Jay and Bob to get the most recent information posted.) It was also agreed that members of the National Review Panel will be asked to once again review the nominations. Ralph will talk with Nat Robinson and John Woeste during the National Review Panel meeting in March, which follows the SGA meeting. Jim agreed to update the current guidelines and criteria and send the information to Pete Granger, who will be the point of contact for submission of applications.
• Fisheries Extension Coordination and Enhancement: This group is planning a meeting the week of October 16 in Florida. $12K has been pledged from throughout the network to help cover the costs of the meeting. About 90 extension agents are expected to attend.
• Educational and Professional Development: Nancy reported that the National Office funding for the SG Academy and the SG Institute was cut from their budget as a result of the overall budget cuts.
• By-Laws Review: no report
• Meeting Planning: will be reported on later in minutes

Nancy will email Assembly to see if anyone wants to join or depart from their committees, and encourage everyone to participate on at least one committee. Bill DuPaul has agreed to continue as liaison to the SG Educators Network. According to the bylaws, Pete Granger, as the at-large member of the EXOM, is the Assembly’s liaison to the Communicators group. Steve Stewart is the educators’ liaison to the Assembly and Kurt Byers is the Communicators’ liaison to the Assembly. The SGA is currently voting on who will be replacing Ron Hodson as the SGA liaison to the Assembly, when Ron retires in June.

SGA meeting March 6-7 in Washington DC

Nancy will be briefing the SGA on Assembly activities (including Brown Bag, May outreach meeting, the Fisheries Extension meeting). Ralph will be presenting a similar briefing to the National Review Panel at their meeting later the same week. Nancy will check with Jamie about how to register for the Knauss reception and Oceans Week reception, if anyone from the Assembly EXCOM would like to attend.

The Assembly EXCOM will hold a meeting Sunday March 5, from 2:30 pm to 5:30 pm. at the hotel. We are appreciative that Elaine Knight of SG Sea Grant is making the arrangements for us, including a phone so that Pete can participate by conference call.

Outreach / Assembly Meeting in Puerto Rico

The meeting is scheduled for May 23-25, with the first day being a combined session with communicators, educators and extension. The Assembly meeting will start on the morning of the 24 th.

The joint planning committee (Nancy, Ralph, Chapa, Aixa Rodriguez, Pauli Hayes, Kurt Byers, Jamie Krauk, Jim Murray, Lyn Whitley) have been focusing on the first day of combined sessions. The focus will be on strengthening our working relationship with the SGA by developing strategies on how the outreach component of SG can help the SGA advance its Congressional priorities. Jon Kramer, Rick DeVoe and Paul Anderson will present the current two Congressional initiatives explain where they stand, and then integrated facilitated breakout groups will meet to address specific objectives and questions.

The rest of the agenda is being finalized and needs to be shared very soon. The lunch speaker for the 23 rd (Louisa Koch, NOAA Office of Education) is unable to attend. In keeping with the theme for the day, it was suggested and strongly endorsed by the EXCOM members participating in this call that we determine the feasibility of inviting the SGA’s new lobbyist to share new approaches to promoting our priorities on the Hill, and to help the lobbyist become more familiar with the outreach side of SG. A second suggestion, also endorsed by the participants on the conference call, is to invite either Rick Spinrad or more likely, Scott Rayder, to talk with us about our relevancy to the NOAA program, and how we are meeting the missions of NOAA, as an outreach program already well-established within NOAA. During an earlier joint planning meeting, Jim Murray had raised the concern that if we were to invite someone from NOAA’s Administrative Office, it might present a uncomfortable situation as we will be discussing that first day how to influence Congress on issues we consider important, which may or may not be compatible with NOAA’s issues. Need to emphasize that we are responding to our constituents and the issues they think are important in the coastal areas. Nancy will pursue these suggestions further with the SGA leadership.

The Puerto Rico Sea Grant folks had a request from an undergraduate student to attend the May meeting, to learn more about extension. After some discussion, it was agreed that this meeting is not the best venue for someone who wants to learn about how extension work is carried out, and that anyone attending the meeting would have to be charged the registration fee. We will consult with the PR Sea Grant folks to find a better way to help this student learn about Sea Grant extension.

For the Assembly part of the meeting – there are many ideas and not enough time to accommodate them. Wary of overfilling the agenda as we did at SG Week. It was agreed that if they are interested and planning to attend, we would like to hear from Mike Liffman, Rick Wallace, Dave Burrage, and Mike Spranger about dealing with and responding to devastating hurricanes. (Mike L. gave an excellent, thought-provoking presentation in SC last fall just after the SGA meeting.)

It was suggested that some of the informational overflow that we’d all like to share and learn from could be presented in poster form (using existing posters or by developing ones for this meeting). Nancy will check with Aixa Rodriguez as to the feasibility of being able to mount posters during the meeting, perhaps during the evening reception. These posters might include programmatic updates, theme team updates, best management practices, tools of the trade, etc. One page handouts of the posters should be provided, and if posters are not feasible, we will encourage that everyone bring the single page handouts to share.

The agenda for the meeting being completed and allotted time for the conference call having expired, the call was concluded at 5:30 pm EST.

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