Rochester Business Journal

With permanent leadership in place, Cornell Cooperative Extension of Monroe County is planning a regional effort to consolidate services with branches in other counties, lowering costs and competing more effectively for federal funding.

The board of the local CCE branch has removed the interim tag from Executive Director William Wynne's title, making him the permanent leader of the organization.

Wynne joined CCE in 2008 during a turbulent period when county budget cuts slashed its funding and left its viability in question.

The organization started fiscal 2009 with a deficit and took efforts to balance the budget by leaving positions open and cutting some administrative costs, Wynne said. The former vice president for advancement at McQuaid Jesuit High School put much of his efforts into creating better dialogue with the Monroe County Legislature and helping donors see that the organization was still viable.

He also is leading an effort to build CCE's image with the general public.

"We live in a Twitter world and a Facebook world, and we know what people's attention spans are," Wynne said. "We can never take our position for granted, and we've upgraded our Web site and started a Facebook page. It's not so much the message we're sending as the medium. The twentysomethings will ignore us if we're not doing those things."

Wynne is promoting an effort to consolidate some services and programs with other CCE branches in Western New York. The Monroe County organization has been a leader in this area, working with five other county branches on a regional business center, he said. Other branches in Western New York have gone even farther, sharing personnel and departments.

"Erie County and Orleans County share an executive director, and they do similar things in other parts of the state too," Wynne said.

Regionalizing efforts are part of a plan from Cornell University to make the extension system more flexible in seeking funding and able to deal better with declining support from counties. Cornell Cooperative Extension crafted a vision statement about how it will support county-based extension work in the future, responding in part to Cornell University's 2010 strategic plan, which calls for a systematic evaluation of the university's outreach and extension programs.

Funding shortages left the organization in need of restructuring, the report states. The entire CCE organization will evolve toward a system of regional centers providing programs and administrative leadership to a group of counties.

"It's a tremendous change, and one thing at the heart of this draft document is the ability to respond better to forces that will provide funds and threats to traditional sources of funds," Wynne said. "It's understood that as a bigger regional organization we will have a better chance for funding."

Creating larger regional programs would allow the branches to apply for new federal support available for public education programs in areas such as energy, food security, climate change and childhood obesity. The Department of Agriculture restructured the way it allocates grants, using a National Institute of Food and Agriculture, which will open funding to other institutions such as state and private colleges.

The individual branches will still work with Cornell University on some grants, Wynne said, but there will be more innovative programs and grant applications coming from the regionalized branches. Wynne is working with the Onondaga branch on a canal corridor project to fund local food delivery systems.

The extension branch in Monroe County also would seek more business partnerships outside the Cornell system, Wynne said. He envisions opportunities to partner with health providers on programs and work with private businesses on agricultural and green energy initiatives.

Doing so would increase the organization's visibility, combating misconceptions that the branch went out of business after funding cuts or was absorbed by a similar effort at Monroe Community College, Wynne said.

"How can we partner with the business community? We need to be looking at that proactively," Wynne said. "That's on my agenda, to get closer to the business community in terms of what we're doing. That could also help give us more visibility."

Maintaining a local presence through the transition would be important, the report states, but this would vary by region. Branches with sufficient county support could participate only minimally in the regional center, while those that have lost funding would have most programming originate from the regional center.

In Monroe County, some program areas such as commercial and consumer horticulture-including landscaping and maintenance of parks and golf courses-could take on a more regional flavor, said James Burch, president of the board of directors for the CCE branch in Monroe County. But the local connection with farmers and other stakeholders must remain strong, he added.

"We're not looking to be a total regional organization," said Burch, owner and operator of Frank & Hale Burch Farms Inc. "We still need to deliver services at the county level and address local needs. We're going to consolidate services where it makes sense but keep local accountability and keep in touch with the people within our own county."

Regional centers would be funded in part through the redeployment of CCE funds now used to support associations.

CCE has been building its infrastructure to prepare for regionalization, and officials said preliminary work can begin this winter and spring, leading up to a summit of CCE leaders in June. The vision statement singled out Western New York as an area conducive to the program.

The area has led in consolidations of services, especially in agriculture, Burch said. Several counties share an agriculture specialist, for example.

"There was enough demand for expert services for each county that having a generalist wasn't working anymore," Burch said. "Now they've got nationally known and sometimes world-class people, and we can serve agriculture better by spreading those people across four or six counties."

2/12/10 (c) 2010 Rochester Business Journal. To obtain permission to reprint this article, call 585-546-8303 or e-mail service@rbj.net.