 My name is Sharon Johnson and I was at Oregon State University Extension in Southern Oregon from 2002 for 12 years, a little over 12 years. And I came to the position from a variety of other positions in Washington and primarily in Washington State that were administrative. So I was a unique appointment, to faculty appointment. I had a ten year track position and moved to associate professor in what started as family and community development and moved to more of a health emphasis over time. I was delighted by the job because it allowed me to be in touch with the community, to look at the data in the community, to track demographics and develop programs that respond into identified need. Programs for older adults, programs for healthy aging, programs for youth and family in poverty. Well, when I was offered the position, I was not familiar with Southern Oregon. I was kind of new to the experience overall geographically or demographically. So I looked at census data, I looked at local trend data on populations and on health issues and tried to unpeel what were what were some of the areas that weren't being tended to. I did key informant interviews with the Rogue Valley Council of Governments, senior disability services, with public health, with people across the community. And I certainly didn't want to develop ideas or programs that they were already doing, but I wanted to collaborate with them and connect with them and understand the niches, the openings, the things that were needed, that extension and a university could supplement, could complement. So that's the direction I started in. My predecessor was Janice Gregg, who had been a home economist, a home extension agent for well over a decade in this area. Very experienced, very knowledgeable about food preservation and farm related issues and big shoes to step into. But I think the offer that I received, and she moved on to another county, was transferred, transitioned, was because the university wanted to do some new things. They wanted to create some some other avenues. And at that point in time, I don't think they were entirely sure what those were. So the message I got was, you know, just just follow your own lead, do what you develop things that you think make a difference, can make a difference. And I took that to heart, saluted that, if you will, and worked very, very long and with high energy on creating programs that seemed to respond to what I had identified as community need and seemed to outreach more to areas that extension might not have dealt with as much, like aging services and community services and programs serving low income families and youth. I found a couple of obvious gaps and a few that I bumped into later on. For example, when I looked at the number of people over 65, 75, 85, and the fact that extension was only serving a small nucleus of about, oh, maybe at that time, about 60, 70, what were called the county council, family community education, was the umbrella. But it was women who had in times past had had the home economists come into their homes, or they had been willing to share with one another. And to some degree with the farming community, their skills in cooking and gardening and food preservation. And there was so much greater need and attention needed to older adults with chronic diseases with health related issues, people who were the age peers of that small group, but were not tuned at all into extensions. So I developed a cadre of classes that dealt with the issues that I had surveyed this community wanted to know more about. Challenges to age related memory impairment, or challenges related to age related memory impairment, sensory challenge, the things that as we age, we worry about. And these were older adults that they no longer were worried about cooking. They were worried about eating enough about transportation to their doctors about the fact that they put their telephones in the refrigerator, their cell phones in the refrigerator and didn't realize that. So the things that I did in the first couple of years were dedicated to healthy aging. And what wasn't out there in the community, I did a lot of connected work with senior disability services and RV cog and got a couple of good grants on breast cancer awareness and chronic disease self management and tried to kind of spread the net that was extension just more broadly, more expansively into the older adult community. I was a different kind of extension agent. I didn't even like that term extension agent because it kind of suggested to me selling cars or real estate. I like the term educator. And I felt that the the responsibility that extension had was broader than just canning peaches the correct way or even herbal gardening. I felt like we could and should just reach beyond that or at least consider reaching beyond that. Not that we wanted to do a whole potload of new and different things and not what we traditionally did, but couldn't we take what we traditionally did and explode it a bit. And the family food preservers were a good example of that. They were very developed. And when I came in, they were a little suspect of me. And what I said is I want to learn from you. But I also want to stretch you. I want to pull you in some new directions. So instead of just talking about water bath canning and dehydration, can we talk about the nutrition related to water bath canning and dehydration and eating in general? And those wonderful women and a few men might remember it a little differently than I do. But it was a bit of pull and tug as they became more willing to try something new, try some evening classes that had a food based focus, but didn't necessarily offer hands on cooking to once again stretch their imaginations and their expertise and their community outreach. And I feel to this day blessed to have known this body of food preservers and master food preservers who I was honored when I left because they made me a lifelong food preservation member and made me commit publicly that I would come back and take the whole series at some point in the future, which I haven't yet, but I still intend to. And what they did, I think for me is remind me that there is a community of people out there who want to come into a common place and do things together. The reasons that people became so dedicated to food preservation as I looked at that closely was because they didn't have a canning kitchen of their own because they didn't have neighbors that they could talk to and they made friends under the food preservation umbrella. So they taught me and I learned from them. The food preservation kind of amazingly grew dramatically in my years with extension. And I think it's less what I did or did not do and more just supporting and incenting and breaking trail for the people who wanted to grow that program. So the trade-off was, I'll give you everything that I can. We're not cutting off this program, not under my watch, but you in turn, I want you to go a slightly different direction. So let's have an exchange of value about that. And they were receptive to that, not to a person. There was some tug and pull, but overall the receptivity and the growth and the impact, I think, was wonderful. And along with that, we had a large statewide grant, a USDA grant around nutrition education and low-income nutrition education. And now currently the SNAP program or the food SNAP program. So there were a lot of parallel tracks that we tried to intersect and identify, intersect and push along more rapidly. The draw for the classes that I developed within the more traditional framework and outside of it was pretty broad-based. I mean, we would have classes that drew from that had traditional family farm folks or people who lived in very rural areas. But we drew in people from Ashland. We drew in people from fairly urban Medford area. It we didn't track where you came from. We tracked age and interest when people came to classes and tried to develop things that, for example, we developed a program called Maximizing, or I had a grant to develop a program with the Northwest Health Foundation called Maximizing Brief Encounters that ended up being a training ground for the volunteers that did meals on wheels or food and friends. And they were people for the most part in their 60s, 70s and 80s who learned how to maximize that moment where they went in and handed a meal to someone who was low income in the Medford area and the Ashland area and the Central Point area and made observations. We called it Oliver. Observe, listen, validate and respond, O-L-I-V-E-R. And that, as a program developed, was picked up by the University of Georgia and they did that program, was used by the food and friends volunteers, still is, to some degree. So Maximizing Brief Encounters has this broad based impact, I think, on older adults and not so older adults and people who are living alone and want to age in place. What I think I did was stir up interest in that group. I did it by developing programs, by asking traditional volunteers to stretch a little, by waving the flag, by writing a column for the male tribune, a way of educating that hadn't been used before, by developing a online video program called Mastery of Aging Well. What it did for me was spur my still post-retirement interest in example. Right now, there are, if I'm remembering my data correctly, there are 7,300 women, over women, over age 65, in Jackson County, who are living alone. And they are sort of held captive in their homes. They're not in assisted living facilities. They're in little tiny homes, or too big for them homes, that would benefit from the attention of extension in ways, I like to think I stimulated, but in other ways as well. I did create a couple of approaches that hadn't been used before. And I hope they keep being used. Under the umbrella of educator, I was one person with a lot of volunteers, and I wanted to know how do you reach the greatest number? And so by knocking hard and repeatedly at the door of the male tribune local newspaper about writing a column, I was able to, with 520 words a week for over a decade, talk about healthy aging in any way that I wanted to, and I could link it back to extension classes. I could make it a silly way of learning about something that was kind of sobering to the aging mind and the aging body. And still today, I write that column and get a whole lot of feedback from people that probably the best compliment is, I have sent every column you ever wrote to my sister in Toledo. People just, as long as it's just short and targeted and sometimes funny, people learn by that. People pick that up. And I think especially older adults who are newspaper readers, pick that up. I did a television series for the Rogue Valley TV, SOU-affiliated TV, prompted by a faculty member from SOU who read my column and said, you know, you should really do that on TV. And I didn't see myself, don't see myself as a TV person at all, but I went to them. They were great. We developed an idea. And every month, for years, I sat down with somebody under a topic that I decided might work. I sat down with somebody from the community who could join me in talking about an issue. They were the expert. I was the host and I still vividly remember I had a group of local pharmacists because I had a pharmacy. I was a pharmacy preceptor, another new way of OSU-affiliating with extension. And the pharmacist who I was interviewing said at the beginning, before the camera went on, he said, I don't know if I can do this. I'm really nervous about this. And he was trembling. The camera clicked on and he said, I mean, he was talking all the time. He was just, and at the end of it, the camera went off and he looked at me and said, that was really fun. I don't get out much. So, you know, it was a way of getting people that were out there already, nursing students, pharmacists. I mean, anybody that I met that was interesting and had a story to tell with an educational underpinning, I would say, I do this TV show and can you join me? And the reception to doing that was significant. And I think they still play some of those shows on a regular basis. I did develop. I was, again, you're always motivated by, you're always motivated by someone who sparks a new direction. As an educator, I think we all are. And I met with an individual on campus in Corvallis who said that he thought online learning was going to be the new horizon. And OSU has since gone many new directions with online learning, but they hadn't considered online learning for older adults who were perhaps homebound. And I had by then developed good relationships with AARP, Oregon. So I approached them and said, what if, together, we find some grant money and we develop this series of modules that could the university would have online and people who were internet users, increasingly older adults were, could just tap into something that gave them an easy listening way of thinking about tough things like hearing loss or sensory loss overall or poor eating habits as they aged. And so with a student from campus and AARP and the folks on campus who know technology much more than I do, we wrote a significantly big grant crossed our fingers that it would get funded. I didn't expect it to at all. The student that was helping me on campus got a severe case of foodborne illness just before it was to be submitted and it had to go. She had to be the person submitting it. But she came through, we got it in, we got it funded and I sent her a big box of refrigerator thermometers after that, but we had for about two years funds to bring people to Southern Oregon or bring to Southern Oregon a taping venue and create little vignettes where I had people come to my house in Jacksonville, older adults, I scripted things, folks from campus came down and videotaped different ways of learning about everything from having thought about this for a long time but from eating more fruits and vegetables to keeping your foods in the refrigerator at the appropriate temperatures. We did kind of all of it. The five modules were memory difficulties in later life, nutrition management, physical activity and exercise, sensory development and because I'm an aging person, I'm not remembering the fifth module right now but they were the ones that I had surveyed extension volunteers and used my column to ask the question, are these the things you think about the most? I was, as was my predecessor, a member of something in the community called the community consortium and that had all the local agencies, not the Rogue Valley Manor necessarily but the community-based nonprofits that met monthly and I would attend those meetings, I actually chaired that coalition for a while and I would always put out my ideas and say, are you interested in this? Do you wanna join with me in that? And that's how I got the health department involved in the breast cancer awareness project. I didn't hesitate to tap on doors for, with Manor as an example, we did a Stanford-based program called Living Well with Living Well Now but the book is Living Well, Living a Healthy Life with Chronic Conditions and we gave that program at the Manor and we trained volunteers in concert with RV Cog and they're in the Stanford curriculum, we trained anybody who was interested so we pulled from all sorts of organizations locally. I have been now retired for over four years and so I'm not as intimate with what's happening with Extension right now. I know that while I was there, I participated together with my colleagues who had expertise in many other areas on not one but two strategic planning committees that talked about what are the primarily technology based changes that we're experiencing in agriculture and what role do we have and should we have into the future and at the second strategic planning session I was a part of, I suggested that perhaps what Extension should do is go back to the more traditional programs, that there was a lot of family and community development programs and the kind of thing that I had done, not that I felt it had been unsuccessful, but it wasn't the natural bailiwick for Extension and my colleagues in other counties, although I was sometimes asked to go and present something new and different with them or pour them or to them and their volunteers, it wasn't a natural outreach for them. They were more comfortable with nutrition and food management and food preservation. The family unit too. Pardon me. And the family unit. And just, yeah, there was more of a close to home feel about what they did, certainly some community outreach, but not to the degree that I felt like we really could and should be doing it in Southern Oregon, but we had a stronger demographic of older adults here than in many other counties, so that might have been what led the way for me. But I did, I do remember posing, maybe we should just abandon the health related outreach that we're doing, family community health was the mantra at that point in time, still is. And just go back to the basics, go back to food preservation and in home education and maybe that's the better way. And I felt like I could say that because that was what I was doing. It was really close to home. I didn't really want that to happen, but I thought maybe it should. And that wasn't where that group was then. The idea was that we should go for online learning and we should think about educating through the newspaper. And I think that's the direction that extension continues to go, but it's harder because it's family farm based and there's a lot out there that there's a lot of connection making you have to do with public health, with senior disability services, with all the multiple don profits. If you're really going to be community based in that broad sense of bigger sense than extension traditionally. Well, I like to think that I have a persona that is cooperative and collaborative. And I think I do. I also am pretty darn organized and I am a risk taker. I'm not risk averse. And I think you couple that with a certain energy level that there's this statement. I think it could be attributed to Bill Clinton. I have more yesterdays than tomorrow's. And when I started my position with extension I was in my early fifties, which was an older start than most. And so I had, and I had done a lot of different jobs. And I think I brought the experience from those responsibilities to play here. And I wanted to do the best I could, one person with a lot of good volunteers just pushing forward all the time. And extension demands that, I think. And I just, I was new to it. I was older, but I was new to it. And I was very intentional that I was gonna use every day and every week as maximally as possible. One of the unique things that I did involved the university's pharmacy program and Southern Oregon University and OHSU's nursing program. And I became for multiple years, first time ever, a preceptor for pharmacy students. I'm certainly not a pharmacist, but I worked with a local pharmacist and with the pharmacy program on campus and had I think five pharmacy interns for six week time periods where they taught medication management classes with me. I had year after year nursing students and we did everything from end of life projects to chronic disease projects. We had a variety of student oriented onsite here in Southern Oregon. I worked with dietetic interns. So in that way, and then I think that's a great way for local extension agents to bring the university back home. How do I live my philosophy? Well, contrary to my intention when I left extension at age 66, I thought I would just keep on learning and I intended to go back and get my PhD and just be a learner, a lifelong learner to the end of my days. But what spoke to me, and I think it started speaking to me when I was at extension is, but there's stuff to be done out there. It's not just about you, it's about stuff to be done. And so my husband and I started a nonprofit. He is a seafood expert, so the idea that he is working with me on aging in place issues and community based outreach is a little amazing to both of us, but we have a nonprofit called Age Friendly Innovators which is grant funded where we do things on fall risk assessment, which is not something I did a lot of at extension. We do things on connecting agencies so that people can be safe at home, not just collaborating, but really connecting them. And so every day of my aging life now is still spent in this community reaching out and reaching into what is, could be said to be under the umbrella of those 7,000 plus women who are living alone and need our support and our incentives. I do try to walk the talk, walking 40 minutes every morning, eating the kind of foods that I used to talk about nutrient dense eating, not every single day and not without some cookies, but I extension and what I did there taught me more than I knew before about how you live a healthy life and how you age well and enjoy it. And I think that's what we wish for ourselves and for our age peers and for our family and for the community as a whole. You know, they say what's good for your head is good for your heart. So constantly being alive and connected and thinking about things, it's not just crossword puzzles and memory games, but it's really listening actively to what people say. And you don't have to be strong and fit and at the gym all the time, but you have to be thinking around the corner. And if we stop doing that after we hit that retirement age, I think it's sad for us. I would hope that we, I am proud to have been a part of Oregon State University Extension programs. I believe that I brought things to that program and that program, those programs and those people brought great things to me. And I would wish for just continuous movement forward with extension that it takes risks, that it listens well, that it does the things that nobody else is willing to do, but collaboratively.