Cooperative Extension has had a long history of successful partnerships with other organizations. Teamwork has enabled us to deliver needed high quality educational programs to audiences that you might not normally associate with Cooperative Extension.

To cite a couple of examples, we now are delivering an educational program, "On the Road to Living Well with Diabetes," to underserved audiences in six counties, thanks to a partnership with the Joslin Diabetes Center in Boston, the University of Hawaii, the University of New Mexico, and the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service.

In the first year, more than 100 people were enrolled in the pilot phase of this project. The two-hour educational program, which promoted significant changes in participants' attitudes about diabetes, included screening of three of five basic diabetes assessment tests and discussions about the need to manage diabetes.

Program participants were encouraged to regularly see a health care provider for assessment of their diabetes. Regular health care is a major factor in preventing or reducing the complications of the disease, which can include heart disease, blindness, kidney failure, and loss of limbs. We anticipate that more than 300 people will enroll in the second year of the project.

We also are partnering with the College of Business and Economics to help counselors in the Small Business Development Centers reach their clientele. Thanks to Extension technology and access provided at some of our learning centers and county extension offices, the SBDC is able to offer interactive counseling sessions via the Internet to a much larger number of communities in Washington state.

Using a low-tech camera and downloadable software, clients and counselors can conference one-on-one, both groups looking at the same documents at the same time. One of the benefits is that clientele get to see the face of the person who is counseling them. Net counseling saves the SBDC both time and money and enables counselors to serve more people.

Partnerships furnish us with both human and financial resources to do our job. Tangible evidence of this is the growing number of grants our faculty have successfully written. In fiscal year 2001, 19 percent of Cooperative Extension's expenditures, about $7.5 million in all, were paid for by grants. That compares with just over 16 percent and $5.5 million in FY 1997.

One of the challenges we face in broadening our program is to convince some of our traditional audiences who may feel threatened by change that to do so is in their best interest. When we narrow our focus, the result is fewer partners, a weaker network, and a weaker ability to respond to the needs of society, including our traditional audiences and stakeholders.