Brief Summary of Minutes of Annual Meeting

Meeting minutes:

https://ucdavis.box.com/s/ujrvjo1erwemiwttj2fyllhdf2z5l7cz

Since our official announcement of multi-state status last year, our team has grown to include nine states including California, Idaho, New Jersey, Wyoming, Florida, Louisiana, Washington, New Mexico, and Missouri. Data collection for our 5^th and current year is still ongoing and we hope to have final numbers reported soon.

Short-term Outcomes: There has been increased interest in states in participating in the study; each year more states join the study. Further, findings from this study have been presented at conferences (such as American Evaluation Association and National Association for Extension 4-H Agents). Fact sheets, webinars, and volunteer trainings have also been venues for dissemination. We expected that as the study continues our outcomes will include increased awareness of generalizability of multistate findings for 4-H youth and family retention; publication of joint (across the states involved) research articles and/or review articles; and greater understanding of 4-H as a culturally relevant program and barriers that exist to inclusion.

Outputs: Since last year, outputs have included a Spanish draft version of the Family Handbook in California, as well as having the California Family Handbook go through the peer review process to become an official publication with UCANR. In addition, the team has presented at many conferences including the National Association of Extension 4-H Agents, the American Evaluation Association, Western Region 4-H Leaders Forum, Society for Research on Child Development, Hawaii International Conference on Education, and the Southern 4-H Regional Directors meeting, as well as presentations in counties via the Data Party model. This model, presents data in a way that clientele can easily understand; it asks relevant questions, and encourages the clientele to come up with the own understanding of the data.

Activities: Activities the past year have remained status quo. Collecting data from first year families and youth and analyzing that data. The biggest hurdle to date is the sheer amount of qualitative data and lack of resources to process. It was discussed at our annual meeting that we may need to refine how we ask our questions in future years, so that we don’t get bogged down in thousands of qualitative responses. In addition, our team has created teams to look at other aspects of this project including impact of the family handbook, communication issues, and a team specifically intended to create tools that extension agents can put to use.

Milestones: This past year our team presented all over the country and increased awareness of our project. To have nine states on board as we move forward will help in our ability to generalize results.

Activities: The research team will consider relevant findings and program improvements made as a result of the work of this group to help inform whether these improvements have impacted retention. For example, the team will continually track retention rates to see if this increases over time. Further, the team will test the impact of some programmatic changes (such as the implementation for the Family Handbook) to see if the changes made increase retention.

Milestones: The team will disseminate findings at national conferences, webinars, facts sheets, journal articles, etc. They will also incorporate recommended practices into programming to help increase recruitment and retention.

Indicators: Number of youth enrolled in the 4-H program; percentage of youth that return to the 4-H program annually.

Espinoza, D., Miller, J., Borba, J., Hill, R., Lewis, K. M., Schoenfelder, E., Trzesniewski, K. (2019, January). 4-H Volunteers define success as knowledge and learning and suggest perceived characteristics that lead youth to success. Paper presented at Hawaii International Conference on Education, Honolulu, HI