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.
In our first blog, we explored why partnerships between Cooperative Extension and community colleges matter for building climate resilience. The second blog examined how the partnerships work in practice through examples from northern California with California Community Colleges and the University of California Cooperative Extension. Now, we go deeper into why partnerships should be supported and how.
Community colleges and Cooperative Extension systems each have distinct strengths that, through more formalized partnerships, could be more effective at meeting shared purpose in the communities they serve. Workforce development and disaster preparedness are two of these areas. Together, Extension and community colleges can leverage their established relationships, expertise, physical structures, and other resources to increase their impact.
Demographic shifts are creating a growing shortage of credentialed workers. According to research from Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, there will be a gap of 4.6 million college-educated workers between 2024 and 2032. This gap is driven in part by retirements, labor-force participation rates, and recent trends in educational attainment. At the same time, the gap is expected to widen as the economy adds 685,000 new jobs requiring at least some postsecondary education and training. Addressing this growing gap in credentialed workers likely exceeds any single entity’s capacity and is an area where joint effort at the local level can be impactful.
Like the northern California forestry partnerships we examined in our previous post, Colorado State University Extension is exploring new partnerships with rural community colleges and nearby universities. This partnership aims to strengthen education and workforce development pathways to help rural learners secure living-wage employment in their communities. Needs assessments in southwestern Colorado surfaced a variety of workforce development needs. Families and learners in the area shared that they are looking for short-term programs that lead to local jobs with living wages, embed culture/language/identity in every aspect, and are delivered at their trusted local community colleges. However, the local community colleges are under-resourced and require supplemental program funds and program management support to meet the needs expressed by the learners and their families. While community colleges will provide the physical space for hybrid learning and local student support, Extension will provide program management and educational content.
The rising frequency and intensity of natural disasters require coordinated efforts to reduce negative community impacts. Budget cuts to programs supporting critical infrastructure to protect communities from disasters and staffing gaps in the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s (FEMA) disaster workforce may undermine disaster preparedness and response, creating greater urgency for these efforts.
Coordinated community-based efforts are essential for disaster response. Research emphasizes that disaster preparedness and response must be contextually relevant and include strategies with multiple components, integrating education, community engagement, professional training, and information dissemination to be most effective. Community colleges and Extension are well-positioned to support these strategies, and coordinated efforts can be especially impactful in their local communities.
The Extension Disaster Education Network (EDEN) demonstrates Extension’s commitment to disaster preparedness and response. EDEN’s formation was a direct result of the lessons learned by the land-grant system responding to the Mississippi and Missouri River floods of 1993. These catastrophic floods made it clear that there were critical gaps in disaster response, and coordinated action was necessary to address the multitude of recovery, mitigation, and preparedness needs in communities. EDEN began as a North Central Region initiative in 1995 and transitioned to a national network in 1998. Since 2003, the United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA[SP8.1]) has provided funding for EDEN.
Effective partnerships between community colleges and Extension systems face significant barriers, particularly around staffing constraints. Building cross-sector relationships requires substantial effort at a time when systems face both staffing reductions and increased workloads. Developing cross-sector partnerships requires additional infrastructure and investment, especially in coordination capacity. Local coordination can be supported through joint personnel appointments (such as Extension agents serving on community college staff or vice versa), regional coordinators, joint advisory groups, and possibly other ways. Clear goals, defined roles, accountability mechanisms, and coordination guidelines can create more efficient and effective partnerships that leverage existing assets within each sector.
Throughout this series, we explored how Extension and community colleges serve communities with complementary strengths. When these systems collaborate, like in developing forestry career pipelines in California’s Sierra Nevada or rural workforce programs in southwestern Colorado, they leverage resources and capacities that neither possesses alone. These examples demonstrate that partnerships are already emerging where local leaders recognize and invest in opportunities for increased impact. However, these collaborations are largely ad hoc rather than systematic. There is an opportunity to invest in coordination and incentive mechanisms that will scale these partnerships to address growing workforce gaps and climate- related challenges more meaningfully.
Photo by Allison Shelley/Complete College Photo Library.
