This was a roller coaster week.  The ANR conference ended Thursday the 27^th and the next morning Davis residents learned of the violent death of David Breaux (The Compassion Guy). Saturday night (April 29) the life of computer science major Karim Abou Najm was ended all too soon. Monday night Kimberlee Guillory was stabbed multiple times and remains in the hospital. By Tuesday mid-day you couldn't find a can of pepper spray in Davis or Woodland. The Police Department had all major TV stations' camera crews present each morning at 7am. Thursday afternoon police had arrested a suspect. Searching of the suspect's house included a helicopter for hours (presumably TV representation). Just a week later on Friday night, people were walking about individually or in groups. Some assemblage of normalcy appears to be returning after a surreal week. This is but one city that suffered unnecessary violence. Numerous others exist across the country leaving people to wonder WHY?

Pollinating rosemary.

Communities are precious. Life is precious. In ANR, we're privileged to contribute to the goodness of making California a better place one person at a time. I'm reminded of this regularly as I review academic merit and promotion packages. Greatness is happening throughout California. For those new to the Division, UC academics are reviewed on a regular basis for merit or promotion. Expectations exist for each rank. I highly recommend academics read the eBook to understand the advancement process. These merits are not a means of granting a cost-of-living increase. These merits acknowledge improved technical and professional competence as well as development of an outreach program. Combined positive impacts are made to make California better.  We're fortunate in UC to have merits built into our academic evaluation process. For many other Land Grant Universities, two types of salary increase exist: COLA (cost of living adjustment) or salary increase when a promotion is achieved. As our name suggests, increasing steps is a function meritorious work of delivering scholarship or scholarly activity, extension programming, university/public service, and affirmative action. A merit is not something one gets merely for living and breathing.

We're excited to extend a warm ANR welcome to new academics Dania Orta Aleman with Nutrition Policy Institute and Clarissa Reyes in Yuba/Sutter. Based on the email exchanges, we'll be welcoming new campus-based specialists soon enough. The following community education specialists were hired to work in counties: Victoria Sandoval, Stanislaus; Andrea Castillo, Kern; Karen Maggio, Contra Costa; Marilynn Click, San Diego; Larry Burrow, Merced; and Marlee Duane, Capitol Corridor.

Yet another incredible week of weather! Blizzards last week in southern California and the Sierra Nevada mountain range made for tough travels and snow bound families. More winter weather this weekend and early in the week has many peoples' patience worn thin. Here are good thoughts for the temps to hold out for months to allow slow melting of snow.  For anyone traveling please remember to pack a double helping of patience, water and plenty of supplies. Winter survival kits are critical given all our snow pack.

Believe it or not, baseball season opening day is a month away!  I can already taste the peanuts and look forward to a trip to the ballpark. Speaking of which, that's one of the activities during the All ANR Conference. Register for the conference and meet the new members of the ANR family! The agenda looks fantastic and we're starting our visioning process.

Responsibilities for each partner in the California Conservation Planning Program: CDFA, NRCS, UC ANR and CARCD.

This week was very exciting with our Technical Assistance rollout webinar for those working on conservation. As mentioned previously, the Memorandum of Agreement for the California Conservation Partnership Planning (C2P2) was signed last year. Tuesday was our first meeting of the partner agency staff. CDFA, NRCS, CA RCD and UC ANR presented their areas of contribution to the agreement. UC ANR provides extension education and engagement, technical assistance (trough Climate Smart and Small Farms CES and academics), outreach, implementation, evaluation and impact analysis. Additionally, all members of the partnership can relay questions about practices back to UC for additional research. Basic and applied research will be identified and done (by UC ANR, Ag Experiment Station faculty, others at UC and through NRCS Conservation Innovation Grants). This provides a phenomenal feedback loop from asking driving questions to analyzing implementation to determine if practices meet desired goals and if they are cost effective.  This is a terrific opportunity for staff at all agencies to understand each agency's superpower and identify who is better qualified to efficiently deliver technical services. It's possible that multiple agencies should participate in technical assistance.

This last week part 2 of programmatic orientation concluded. Thank you to all those who helped share information with our new colleagues: Igor Lacan, Rebecca Ozeran, Mark Hoddle, Kelly D Scott, Kathy Nolan, Jim Farrar, Nicole Marshall, Kate Lyn Sutherland, Darren Haver, Lynn Schmitt-McQuitty, Katherine Webb-Martinez,Fadzayi Mashiri, Yana Valachovic, JoLynn Miller, Aparna Gazula, Julia Kalik aand Vikram Koundinya. Kudos to Greg Ira, Daniel Obrist, Sherry Cooper and Julia for all your efforts to organize and deploy orientation.

I look forward to the week ahead where mentors and mentees will be meeting in Davis to kick off academic mentoring. 

The meeting over the long weekend in San Diego is rarely my favorite meeting, but I managed to leave with some reading. I need to become more of a reader if I am to keep up with it.

A manuscript I hope to read talks about the changing role of higher education dealing with wicked problems. I have no excuse not to read it because it is available for download via Digital Commons. Our opening speaker, Richard Meyers, took us on a brief journey of his experiences both as the15th Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for the U.S. Air Force and now as the 14th president of Kansas State University. He talked about the role of public universities and the similarities he has observed within his very distinct careers. One of the speakers later in the conference spoke about the need for public institutions to serve the critical role as an anchor and catalyst for community improvement. I suspect Justin Morrill had the same idea.

Throughout much of the conference, we talked about community engagement as a key to successfully effecting change to improve community challenges. We received an update on the efforts by Cooperative Extension to partner with the Robert Woods Johnson Foundation (RWJF) in policy, systems, and environmental change in communities across the country. I highly recommend a visit to the webpage to read the report. During the first phase of the project, three locations in Utah serve as pilot projects. We learned about the work taking place in Emery County, UT, led by youth, to drive suicide and addiction prevention programs. The activities are impressive. I can't wait to learn about outcomes. The conversation was about more than this project addressing community-scale condition change and the value of measuring change at both the individual level but also the community level. One example made use of zip code-driven data on community life expectancy. However, even at this scale, there are differences. For instance, in a 10-block area in one Northeastern city, the average life expectancy is 16 years less than the national average of 75 years. The conversation, as a whole, was worthy of thinking.

The RWJF announced the 2019 Culture of Health Prize winners. Among the five is the community of Gonzales, CA (Monterey County)! The community story demonstrates a commitment to continuous improvement to make tomorrow better than today.

One of our final speakers was not only dynamic but had a great message. His comments reflected that of an earlier speaker who repeated C.S. Lewis' words that "You can't go back and change the beginning, but you can start where you are and change the ending.” He, too, talked about the importance of higher education and public institutions and the need to make that experience accessible to all so that we really can make tomorrow better than today. To do so, requires each of us stepping beyond our comfort zone to be the change we seek. I appreciated his example that this means changing the paradigm from having 'weed out courses' in the first-year curriculum to 'opt-in' courses. Finally, he reminded us that our habits become our character. Our character becomes our destiny. I left with more reading, The Empowered University.

There will be no time for reading tomorrow. However, I have a chance to see some of our newer UC ANR members during the Administrative Orientation, so it will be a great day. Beyond that, I haven't looked at my calendar but, we will keep working to make each day a bit better.