It does seem like we just returned from the holiday break but I won't complain about having Monday off earlier this week. The weather was exactly what I envisioned for California ‘winter'. But early Tuesday morning everyone in UC ANR was back at it, hard at work I am sure.

As always there is much going on. Candidates to be interviewed for the Vice Provost – Statewide Programs and Strategic Initiatives are being narrowed down. If you don't already have February 16-17 on your calendar, please mark it down. Those will be the dates that interviews are held. The interviews will be recorded with feedback due sometime the following week. Feedback on the candidates really is important to us in making a decision!

The search committee has finalized its recommendation for the Vice Provost – Cooperative Extension position and I will be working hard to fill that position. In the meantime, Chris Greer has agreed to remain on until June 1^st (thanks Chris!). I am hopeful that might even provide a bit of an overlap between Chris and the incoming Vice Provost which would be nice for all affected by the change.

Wednesday (today) was the Town Hall meeting to provide an overview of the UC ANR strategic plan and answer any questions. At one point 177 participants joined the conversation via Zoom and approximately 50 of us were in the Davis UC ANR building. VP Glenda Humiston provided overviews of the goal of the strategic plan, the process used to gather input, and the resulting goals in the plan. The remaining 45 minutes or so of the hour-long meeting was focused on questions. Several questions were related to fundraising (plans and strategies to raise funds, intended uses of the funds). Other questions were around communicating progress on reaching the goals set forth in the plan. This is a great question and one that one of the Strategic Initiative leaders got me thinking about late last week. Somehow we want to be able to share the division's progress on attaining the goals without getting bogged down with details about where we are in the process. Any suggestions?? If you have some, I'd love to hear them! One of the Zoom participants suggested a graphic or visual representation – maybe something like the thermometers that organizations use to show status of fundraising targets? Give this some thought and I will give it some more thought, too.

One of the questions was about the program prioritization process (goal #5). Like pretty much all of the goals, we don't know what the result of this will look like and haven't formulated a plan to go about gathering information and making any decisions needed to reach this goal. This will be a portion of the agenda for a 2-d retreat to take place at the end of the month. As the ‘goal owner' for goal #5, I have to admit that I was perfectly comfortable early on in the strategic plan development process to leave this as a strategy under another goal. But I understand and ‘buy in' now to the idea that this is so important to who we are and the value we bring to California that it makes sense to have this as a stand-alone goal. As I said at the Town Hall, it is a good business practice to review what you do and how you do it. But this is no easy task for such a large organization with some many different programmatic efforts, all of which make a difference in someone's life. And key questions to think about as we undertake the process is what, if any, programming is needed to realize the 2025 Vision and how do those needs align with current efforts? Still a huge task and, as a result, a few of us have met with someone who I think can help all of us work towards answers. Following development of a draft plan at the retreat I intend to share the plan with strategic initiative leaders, statewide program and institute directors and county directors then finalize a process and approach for having these big conversations so that they are inclusive, not overly time-consuming and lead to information that furthers us in our goals. No doubt success will take time and will benefit from the collective brainpower of everyone at UC ANR. I suspect it's one of those things that you get out of it, what you put into it.

Tomorrow and Friday I am off to visit Marin and Sonoma counties and the Hopland REC. I am looking forward to it and here's hoping for a sunny visit! But just in case, I did get a pair of rain boots. These weren't high on my list to pack when I moved to drought-stricken CA back in June but lately it seems the rain boots may just be a good investment.