Wilcher, multistate team win awards for Community Development 101 program
Aaron Wilcher, UC Cooperative Extension community and economic development advisor for Inyo, Mono and eastern Kern counties, is part of a team that won awards for Community Development 101 from both the National Association for Community Development Extension Professionals and the Community Development Society.
The effort to create a Community Development 101 program for new professionals in the field was led by the Southern Rural Development Center at Mississippi State University. A working group of Extension and campus-based faculty throughout the nation contributed to the program.
Aaron shares the awards with Sreedhar Upendram, an associate professor in the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics at University of Tennessee Knoxville; John Green, director of the Southern Rural Development Center and emeritus professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics at Mississippi State; Grace Langford, Extension Associate III, Southern Rural Development Center, Mississippi State; Dan Kahl, an associate professor in the Community and Leadership Development Department at the University of Kentucky; and Kara Salazar, assistant program leader for community development and sustainable communities extension specialist at Purdue University.
The team was honored at a ceremony at the NACDEP Conference, held June 15-18 in Wichita, Kansas; and again with the Community Development Society's Outstanding Program Award at the 2026 Annual CDS Conference, held July 19-22, in Savannah, Georgia.
The CDS Outstanding Program Award recognizes completion of superior programming that exemplifies and positively influences community development practice, reflects the Principles of Good Practice throughout the implementation process and has demonstrated sustained success.
Aaron served as a trainer at the NACDEP and CDS conferences, where the team offered the program as preconference workshops.
Community Development 101 is available in the Community Development Extension Library.
The curriculum has been offered to professional societies and as part of state training for academics and staff. The working group continues to meet and is considering opportunities to expand the curriculum, include online components and offer to new audiences. For more information, contact Aaron at awilcher@ucanr.edu or Grace Langford at gel17@msstate.edu.
NPI free school meal article honored
A publication authored by the Nutrition Policy Institute team and their collaborators was voted as a Best Article finalist by the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior.
The 2025 publication explores the perspectives of school food authorities in eight U.S. states on the impact of deimplementing federal Universal Free School Meal policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Articles were evaluated by a committee who selected the top articles to be voted on by their Board of Editors. Articles were ranked for their:
- Importance of the problem addressed
- Contribution to knowledge and understanding
- Innovativeness and creativity
- Quality of the research design
- Quality of the writing and presentation
The article, Impact of Deimplementing Universal Free School Meals: School Food Authority Perspectives, was published in November 2025 in the Journal of Nutrition Education and Behavior by Juliana Cohen of Merrimack College and Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and along with NPI researchers Monica Zuercher, Dania Orta-Aleman, Christina A. Hecht, Ken Hecht, Lorrene Ritchie and Wendi Gosliner; Leah E. Chapman of Merrimack College; Punam Ohri-Vachaspati, of ASU College of Health Solutions; Deborah A. Olarte of New York University; Anisha Patel of Stanford University; Michele Polacsek of University of New England; and Marlene Schwartz of the University of Connecticut.
This study was funded by a grant from Healthy Eating Research and California General Fund SB 170.
This award was presented during an awards ceremony on July 31 at the Society for Nutrition Education and Behavior 2026 International Conference in Washington, D.C.