Water Outreach - Enhancing stewardship actions through applying Best Education Practices

Community involvement has been identified as the key to successfully implementing state and federal agency plans for clean and safe water across the nation. During 2000 – 10, the USDA Water Program funded two national facilitation projects to more effectively link community interests with outreach activities that had the potential to create desired stewardship impacts. These projects, the Water Outreach Education Project and the Changing Public Behavior Project, connected Extension educators, natural resource professionals, and other professionals focused on water education with Best Education Practices, and skills to apply education and social science research in new and creative ways to encourage the public to adopt environmentally friendly habits. Water educators learned to focus on local interests and conditions when encouraging specific audiences (farmers, homeowners, landowners, etc.) to take environmentally appropriate actions in their home, business, organization, or community. Resources provide a framework that makes it easier for water professionals to incorporate those understandings into their outreach initiatives. The Changing Public Behavior Project built on the work of the Water Outreach Project. Both projects worked with national advisory teams, and with the audiences the project was designed to support, to assess needs, to develop and test resources, and to implement professional development opportunities. While neither project was funded to follow participating educators and learn whether their audiences exhibited more vigorous or better quality stewardship of the water resource, we were able to establish specific educator needs and evaluate the ability of project resources to meet those needs. One of the greatest measures of impact were the number and variety of professional audiences that requested training, and ultimately the number of professional groups that built the principles of our work into published resources for their members and others. The poster and an accompanying handout will outline approaches, outcomes, and impacts in more detail.