Strengths - Challenges - Opportunities Statement

Insight into our institutional, organizational, and personal strengths, challenges, and opportunities provides us with the conceptual framework to better define how we function in order to meet our stakeholder needs.

Our Strengths

Maryland Cooperative Extension faculty and staff strive in our work and programs to reach people and communities with real educational needs. We take pride in our role as scholarly knowledge providers, helping people make sound decisions to improve their lives. We:

Offer Maryland citizens unparalleled access to national and regional resources with timely information on critical issues, from faculty and staff who conduct research and education programming at 24 extension offices, five research and education centers, and four university campuses.
Are respected by individuals and communities as knowledge providers who help answer specific questions and needs.
Celebrate the diversity of people and programs within MCE, recognizing the quality of our faculty, staff, and administration, and the expertise and dedication they provide the people of Maryland through relevant programs.
Achieve excellence in MCE programs through our ability to teach effectively-- using unbiased, research-based information, integrated with the experiential knowledge of our learners, to solve their practical problems.
Respect lifelong-learning and the need to balance the differing needs of our urban and rural communities.
Provide opportunities for all people to learn how to assess and change behaviors and practices to improve the quality of their environment and their lives.
Have experience and skill in nurturing traditional and fostering new, yet perhaps unexpected, partnerships that utilize multi-state and multi-institutional efforts to share resources, and to appropriately respond to changing citizen needs.

Our Challenges

Maryland Cooperative Extension is challenged to:

Communicate the MCE mission throughout Maryland and promote opportunities to help its citizens.
Think differently about, and where appropriate redirect, staffing to create flexible appointments as sources of funding of positions and/or programs change.
Develop visionary leadership, foster excellence among faculty, and sustain support staff to be in a position to address current and emerging issues given the need to balance available resources.
Seek new ways to recruit and retain faculty and staff that reflect the diversity of our state and provide relevant and timely programs to meet the diverse needs of our citizens.
Build an internal working environment that fosters cooperation and teamwork by strengthening existing and developing new partnerships-- internal and external.
Define the scholarship of Extension as it relates to our mission, vision, and faculty promotion and tenure process.
Review conventional thinking about the role and function of local extension offices and our state and regional specialists.
Work across disciplinary and institutional boundaries on common, high-priority initiatives.
Look for new sources of funding while making every effort to increase budgetary support from traditional sources to achieve our mission.
Work within a society where communication and information technology makes access to information (both accurate and inaccurate) readily available in most, if not all, communities.
Create effective systems for all aspects of the work that we do to ensure that paperwork, regulations, and other requirements do not hinder the ability of faculty and staff to respond in a timely manner to learners’ needs.

Our Opportunities

As MCE looks ahead to future programming directions, we will be prepared to take advantage of current and potential opportunities. Taking advantage of opportunities will allow us to better implement our goals and answer our challenges as well as demonstrate MCE’s leadership in the future. We will:

Showcase and promote the strengths and the potential public benefits that extension programs have and can have in meeting the challenges of today and of the future.
Provide leadership within MCE at all levels in the organization that is flexible, proactive, and able to meet new challenges in innovative ways.
Capitalize on existing partnerships and create new ones between and within MCE, the college, and the University, as well as with our audience, that help us address the unique opportunities provided by rapidly changing demographics, dynamic educational needs, and evolving issues.
Make use of communication and information technologies to improve internal and external communication methods, provide flexible and timely program delivery, and make effective and efficient use of available resources.
Provide educational opportunities to diverse communities and develop programs that are responsive to existing, new, and changing audiences.
Position MCE as one of the premier sources of relevant, accurate, timely, and unbiased research-based information, using in-house as well as outside sources.

For more information, contact Jim Hanson

Last updated: 09/27/2006

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