Commissioners get update from UW Extension

A portion of the Big Horn County Commissioner meeting on February 20 was designated for an update from the University of Wyoming Extension. Melissa Cook, Community Vitality & Health Extension Educator, gave the update.
Cook began with the Needs Assessment.
“The last time I was here, I was working on a Needs Assessment and trying to figure out what the community’s assets and needs were,” she said. “I have learned through my work that my Needs Assessment is actually for my programming: I take all the needs that people tell me, and then I decide what of those needs works for my programming, (it’s) not necessarily (a) Needs Assessment like you would do for the county. (Later this year, I will be learning) my role for your county’s Needs Assessment when I attend a Julie Daniels seminar for Needs Assessments for Counties, where she brings in key people from the county and develops Needs Assessment for them.”
Cook added she has been doing a lot of training. She said extension educators in the first year are supposed to get to know their communities and do training. The training, Cook said, will give educators training to provide skills to the community; the job goes from slowly getting to know the community to providing programming.
The Winter Survival Skills is one of the first programs Cook did to get to know the community and put into practice some of the training she has done. She has gone to facilitator boot camp and mediation training, and is now a trained mediator.
“Farmers and ranchers can have a mediator between them and the bank, them and their neighbors. If there are issues in their life, they can be part of the mediation program,” she said.
To get to know the communities she serves, Cook has been going to meetings and events. She also joined the Harvest Wyoming Ag Team.
“Even though I am on the community vitality and health, and that’s different, there are a number of different kinds of educators for the University of Wyoming. There is one person that specializes in tourism, one person that specializes in pesticides, and then they have, I think, seven in community vitality and health and countless ag people. So the community vitality and health currently have a Wyoming Harvest team, and that team is supposed to get the information out about community grown foods, so the community knows — kinda like Greybull has its lettuce that they put in stores.”
Cook also talked about a store opening in Lovell that will feature homegrown foods. The owner of the store will ask people to bring in products to the store -- “Not necessarily homegrown, but local foods to be sold in the community, and they don’t have to go through all these stringent things that you would do if you were a canner like Del Monte,” Cook said. “It is also understood that when you come in the door, you are at a farmer’s market. That is what Wyoming Harvest is all about.
“Wyoming Harvest Ag, their role is from the time the seed is planted to until it is harvested, then the community vitality takes it from the time it is harvested to the time it is in your pantry, then the Centsible Nutrition people take from the time it is in the pantry to what’s on the table. It’s one big group working on the same thing, but we are all in our different categories, so I thought if I joined the ag team, it would do two things.”
One of those things, according to Cook, would provide an understanding to the community vitality and health of what the ag community is doing. One of the reasons she wanted to be on the Ag Team was because she grew up in Detroit, then spent her career in remote Alaska. She can tell people about fishing and what tree needs to be cut down in a forest but nothing about agriculture, and she recognizes that this is a deficit in her ability to help the community. The team should help her understand the ag issues.
She has signed up for the Annie’s Project that is offered by UW Educator Gretty Gasvoda. Cook believes this will further help her understand some of the pressures of the ag community.
She never knew about Extension offices until she took this job. Cook noted she has joined the Program Action Team (PAT), and in a follow-up email Cook explained what PAT is, writing, “The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture has cooperative extension resources through the Extension Committee on Organization & Policy. This forward-thinking group developed the Program Action Teams (PAT), of which I am a member of the Economic and Workforce Development team and serve on the credentials subcommittee. The team’s goal is to be proactive in determining the changes coming in the job market by 2030 and to help prepare university extension educators to adapt programming to meet the evolving needs of communities nationwide. We meet monthly via Zoom.”
The position on the board has provided her an understanding of what Extension does.
“Extension basically is an extending arm from the university to the communities that they serve, and they provide information,” Cook said. “For the first 100 years, they provided agriculture information, and now that they are in their second 100 years, they want to continue the ag, but they are adding health. They are hoping to do for health what the ag did for the farming industry in the first 100 years. They want to do it in health for diabetes and heart health, that type of thing, adding the second extension of community vitality and health.”
Cook attended a UW Extension Ag conference in Cody.
“Not that I understood all this, I don’t,” she said. “They were talking about the science of phosphorus versus putting magnesium on their crops, putting chemicals on their crops and feeding their crops. There are cells in the plants that, if you give them too much of this, this is what your plant looks like; too much of that, this is what your plant looks like. For the farmers, this is great information because they understood those details, but for me it was great to understand the stress of putting too much of one chemical on your plant. (They also talked about) the implementation of a sprinkler system and the cost of that and where the money is in the sprinkler system and extending it further on as far as a larger sprinkler versus a smaller one; that is where I gained knowledge from being at that conference to understand some of the issues farmers and ranchers are dealing with.” She was also able to visit with people in ag in the Big Horn Basin.
EMT class
Cook gave an update on the EMT class. She said Burlington will have six new EMTs. She said it will be a great relief to the Burlington ambulance crews. Speaking directly to Commissioner Dave Neves, she said, “Especially to your daughter-in-law Amanda, that she will be able to take a little break and go to town and not worry so much about getting back because she is worried about the ambulance. There are not too many EMTs that can cover day shifts.” She noted there will be two new EMTs in Greybull.
She thanked Adrian Preator for finding students for the EMT classes who are home-based workers.
There should be an Emergency Medical Responder class soon. 
Mental Health
Cook noted she has also been studying suicide prevention training and may become a trainer herself. She has also been attending Ag Stress meetings for women online.
According to Cook, mental health was number one in her assessment for Big Horn County. She said access to mental health came up as number one for the Three Rivers assessment.
She continued, saying she has been working the Big Horn County Citizens for Economic Development (BHCED). “Bill Hayes’ group. They say you can’t have good economic development until you have good health, and they say that repeatedly in their meetings, and as we go to the health planning meetings for Worland, this comes up often.”
Cook discussed the BHCED Mental Health Fair in Shell last year.
“People didn’t want to leave,” she said. “It was captivating for them to be able to sit and listen to issues that other people have and how they are solving them.” She went on to state that the session in Cowley wasn’t as successful, but they are moving forward with a fair in Worland.
“I have been helping BHCED with that,” Cook said. “They are paying my gas mileage to support my attendance to their weekly planning meetings.” The fair will be March 16.
“When you see a sign on the bulletin board, and you wonder, ‘What’s that about?’ it says mental health fair, mental fitness fair, whatever the different ones call themselves, ‘cause I foresee this continuing. I know Cody is interested in doing one. This effort is just like breast cancer, which was once something you only whispered about. You didn’t want to say breast cancer out loud, so they started with the pink ribbons to get people to say breast cancer out loud, that it’s OK to say breast cancer. They want to be able to say mental health the same way, that mental health is no different than having breast cancer, so they have the pink ribbon for breast cancer and the yellow feather for mental health. They will be giving away yellow feathers when you walk in the door.”
Cook then described to the commission what it is like to go to one of the mental health fairs.
“My role in that is: they asked me to chair the committee, and I explained that my role is an extension educator is not to come in and take over anyone’s project,” she said. “My role as an extension educator is to help others with their projects: help them succeed, not to be the person that is out there running it, be the person helping the person that is running it, so my role has been to give their chair the timeline of what things need to be done. I’ve been a part of the Wyoming Writer’s Conference for years, so I kinda have an idea on what needs to be done, when to get a conference ready so providing her with that kind of information and answering questions.”
She went on to say that she has had some requests for suicide training, so she will be working on that.
“In my research of mental health, I found through the training that I had that 22 percent of the people that commit suicide are actually 65 and older, and I have a little experience with that in that my grandmother was 92 when she committed suicide in a nursing home, and I have experience in suicide in that my niece committed suicide last April at 35. My stepbrother committed suicide at 62. His son committed suicide at 33.”
She gave two examples of living family members that have mental health issues, saying that she knows about mental health and that she has spent her life taking care of those who struggle.
With this background and knowing that she needed to get out to meet the public and help with seniors, Cook came up with a winter survival skills flyer that talked about winter physical safety like what motorists should have in your vehicle. She gave a presentation in all of the senior centers in the Big Horn Basin.
“My job as the extension educator from Big Horn County is to serve Big Horn County 70 percent of the time and the Big Horn Basin 30 percent of the time, according to our training,” Cook said. She added that the training was provided to nearly 400 people. A flyer also went home to the seniors that have meals delivered.
Her goal was to provide not just tips about what to have in a vehicle, but also who should be doing the snow shoveling if you slide off the road and how to stay warm.
She also talked about mental health and that was well received. “‘We need this,’ they told us. ‘We need to have these conversations,’” Cook said.
UW Wyoming Walks
Cook gave an update on the Wyoming Walks for Seniors program. UW has initiatives that they have adopted, including Wyoming Walks. She put her own spin on it and directed it toward seniors to get them out of the house in winter. She had a partnership with the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody. The partnership created four days that Big Horn Basin seniors could spend the day in the center for free, along with their caretakers, and part of the day was devoted to a 45-minute tour. She said 108 people came to the center over those four days. She has more Wyoming Walks planned.
“The Wyoming Walks are intended to get people out walking and moving, and building community, building friendships and remembering where their resources are in the community by visiting them — that’s the goal,” she said. “But we also want to get people out to learn.”
Food preservation
and safety
Cook is holding a food preservation six-week training course through the University of Idaho Extension.
“It will give me the skills to be able to answer the questions for the community members on food preservation that I couldn’t last year,” she said.
Last year, she tested gauges and handed out the information but didn’t feel confident to answer questions. She said this was an example of getting out to know the community but not having the training to answer questions. She will be providing classes in food preservation safety.
She continued that she reached 6.87% of the adult population in the county with the message that testing the canning gauge on the canner needs to be tested every year. She explained that she had canned for 40 years and didn’t know the gauge needed to be tested.
She will also be going to a boot camp. She will then be the trainer for food safety for UW. Cook will then go on to train people throughout the Basin.
Cook is working at getting flyers out in Spanish. She said that 10% of people in Big Horn County are Hispanic. Greybull has a population that identifies as 28% Hispanic.
A master gardener program is also in the works.