The Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development is hosting a regional hands-on workshop for extension faculty and staff working on land use issues, to nurture such sharing and communication. At the workshop, participants will identify common programming needs, share program ideas, learn more about the land use educational programming in other northeast states, and find ways of supporting each other and working together. This is an ideal opportunity to get to know extension faculty and staff in nearby states who are working on land use issues, what's working for them (and what's not), and opportunities for working together to improve your own programming.

The 2003 Northeast Extension Land Use Workshop will be held May 5 and 6, in State College, PA. The format of the workshop is designed to encourage discussion, program sharing, and planning, with much time spent in small group work and discussion. There will be a poster session with resource sharing tables, providing a direct opportunity to highlight your own state's programs.

One concrete outcome of the workshop will be the creation of several regional working groups focused on specific land use programs (as identified by workshop participants). The workshop results and working group foci also will be used to develop some regionally-supported, multi-state land use programs, and a follow-up, Train-the-Trainer regional conference sometime in 2004.

Each State Extension Director in the region has been asked to identify and contact three to five of their state's extension faculty and/or county staff actively involved in land use issues (e.g., farmland and open space preservation, farm-nonfarm conflicts, (smart) growth management, water quality, local government/planning, CAFOs, niche marketing, new farmer programs) to attend the workshop. Ideally, this will be a mixture of county staff and university faculty, and we hope to enlarge the pool of participants to include those who do not traditionally view this as their area of responsibility, but who would like to become engaged in land use related issues at the community-level (such as 4-H and FYC educators).