This blog was created in partnership with the Foundation for California Community Colleges with the support of the Lumina Foundation. Special thanks to Jeff Clary for his collaboration on this series.
How does collaboration between community colleges and Cooperative Extension happen in the real world? In the first blog post in this series, we explored why partnerships between Cooperative Extension and community colleges matter for climate resilience. Since each state and region is different, in both the challenges they face and the organizational models for Extension and community colleges, we observe a variety of approaches at work. California’s partnerships between the University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE) and California Community Colleges (CCCs) offer particularly instructive examples. In rural northern California, these collaborations address both immediate workforce needs and long-term climate resilience.
The region faces critical challenges: decades of hands-off management have left many forested areas in an overgrown state, leading to widespread risk for catastrophic wildfire that threatens homes, businesses, natural resources, and outdoor recreation. Building a skilled workforce that is better able to manage forests and wildfires is essential. To that end, UCCE and CCCs are working together on several fronts, from creating pathways into forestry programs to sharing infrastructure and integrating curricula.
In some cases, UCCE acts as a direct bridge between programs at CCCs and related degrees at the University of California campuses, building education pipelines. Each year, UCCE recruits students from CCCs to a tailored one-week forestry camp held at the UC Berkeley educational field station at Blodgett Forest in the mountains of the Sierra Nevada. The course is a condensed version of an eight-week camp that UC Berkeley forestry students complete; it is designed to introduce community college students to the outdoors and to survey a wide range of tools and methods used in forest-management professions. The goal is to get these students hooked on the idea of a career in forestry. The camp has shown success in increasing the pipeline of community college students into UC Berkeley’s degree programs.
Other UCCE-CCC collaborations illustrate creative approaches to the logistical challenges of offering training programs in mountainous rural areas, where many kinds of institutional infrastructure are scarce. Rural community colleges provide much of that infrastructure. UCCE regularly offers training courses in Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and other skills across rural northern California, but the Extension system lacks meeting space and labs of its own. They turn to colleges as host sites for those classes. In return, UCCE reserves several seats in the classes for local community college students and showcases the relevant certifications and degrees the college offers.
Integrating Extension Curriculum
Still, other examples integrate UCCE curriculum directly into community college degree programs, in some cases for credit. The California Naturalist program is a long-standing UCCE offering that provides participants with a broad introduction to the natural history of California, including plants, animals, geology, and ecological interactions. At College of the Redwoods on California’s north coast, the California Naturalist curriculum is taught by college faculty and is offered for credit. Through the course, students in the forestry degree program can gain a greater understanding of the forested landscapes they will work in.
Beyond workforce training, UCCE and CCCs are also collaborating on disaster preparedness and response. Although documentation of these efforts is less formal than that of the educational programs, it represents another dimension of the partnership. One area of overlap has centered around evacuation and care of livestock when wildfires threaten farms and ranches. California uses an “Ag Pass” system that UCCE Livestock and Range Advisors help coordinate with growers; the Ag Pass streamlines the ability of growers to move their animals to safe settings. When evacuations occurred in recent years, community colleges such as Shasta College in Redding have served as host sites for evacuated livestock.
These examples from northern California illustrate the range and flexibility of Extension and community college partnerships. Whether building educational pipelines, sharing infrastructure, integrating curriculum, or responding to emergencies, these collaborations leverage the benefits of both systems to address the needs of rural communities and statewide. In the final post in our series, we will explore more about why and how these partnerships should be supported.
Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library.
