For nearly 90 years, North Carolina Cooperative Extension has focused on ensuring that the state’s people have access to the research-based knowledge and resources of its land-grant universities, N.C. State and N.C. A&T State University. A new Gateway County initiative under way at N.C. State aims to build on that tradition by connecting people, communities and businesses with even more of the university’s expertise.

Cooperative Extension has centers in all 100 North Carolina counties and on the Cherokee Reservation, and 12 have been selected for the pilot project.

The gateway counties represent North Carolina’s geographic and economic diversity — from Cumberland, Currituck, Dare, Lenoir, Martin and Pamlico in the east to Forsyth, Gaston, Mecklenburg and Wake in the Piedmont to Transylvania and Haywood in the mountains.

Traditionally, Cooperative Extension programs have focused on five areas: agriculture and forestry, natural resources, community and rural development, 4-H youth development and family and consumer education. County-based programs in these areas are backed by research and extension specialists mainly from the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, with a few campus specialists assigned to Cooperative Extension in the College of Natural Resources and the College of Design.

The Gateway County project aims to involve more university units in meeting needs in the traditional program areas and beyond, said Dr. Jon F. Ort, director of the North Carolina Cooperative Extension Service and assistant vice chancellor for extension and engagement.

The project began about a year ago with a series of get-acquainted meetings between Extension directors from the gateway counties and administrators from several university units.

As David Fogarty, the Extension director in Gaston County, explains, “Cooperative Extension has always been engaging with the counties where it serves and with the university. But it depends entirely on the individual efforts of the county Extension staff members to make contact. There’s been no process in place to find out what, for example, the College of Design has available for counties, and no process for colleges to know the needs of counties.”

The Gateway County steering committee meetings also have been helpful, he said, in helping campus-based administrators understand how Cooperative Extension work and in helping county Extension faculty “understand the constraints and conditions under which the colleges operate.”

Following a couple of the early project steering committee meetings, N.C. State University Chancellor Marye Anne Fox made the first public announcement of the initiative in late March in Gaston. There, along with county officials, she cut a ribbon in front of the Extension center.

Since then, Extension staffs in the gateway counties have been exploring new ways of using university expertise to meet some of their county’s highest priority needs.

In Haywood County, for example, the gateway initiative has brought the office of an agent with the College of Engineering’s Industrial Extension Service into the county Cooperative Extension center. And County Extension Director Bill Skelton is thinking about ways to get university faculty members involved in such locally important issues as air quality, Internet training and access and science education in public schools.

In Gaston County, Fogarty wonders if the Industrial Extension Service might have ideas for helping the county convert its 6 million square feet of vacant industrial sites into new businesses. Or if the College of Humanities and Social Sciences’ new institute for non-profit organizations could build on recent Cooperative Extension programs helping the county health department and United Way understand and use Census data in developing grant proposals and programs.

Because each county’s needs differ from the next, university administrators have developed no set formula for what each of the gateway centers will do.

“The initiative is designed to be flexible enough to allow each county center to tailor programs to meet its county’s unique needs,” Ort said. “The problems that our counties face are highly variable and complex, and they often require solutions involving more than one discipline.

“We hope that the gateway initiative will be a catalyst for bringing the wealth of knowledge and research within N.C. State’s various colleges and disciplines to bear in solving these problems.”

Said Brent Henry, who directs Wake County’s Extension programs, “Through the gateway initiative, if we are really listening, I believe we can make an impact that communities can see and appreciate.”

— Dee Shore