August 29, 2024
With election day quickly approaching, Cristy Schmidt, CECD applied research educator, collaborated with the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania to develop “Pennsylvania Election Process: A Quick Guide for Citizens,” a package of materials aimed at helping counties inform and engage the public about the election process.
August 2, 2024
The CECD’s Cristy Schmidt was part of a team of Penn State Extension educators who won a 2024 Excellence in Teamwork award from the National Association of Community Development Extension Professionals (NACDEP) for their project, “Partnering to Create PA Municipal Active Transportation Plans.” The team, whose members are John Turack, Neal Fogle, Peter Wulfhorst, Matt Spindler, Er Yu, and Cristy Halerz-Schmidt, was named a national runner-up and Northeast region winner.
May 16, 2024
CECD affiliate faculty member Maria Spencer leads the college's first-of-its-kind graduate summer fellowship pairing Penn State graduate students with industry mentors to help students navigate the transition from academia to careers in industry. Read about graduate student Xialing Zhao's experience working with Sysco to support a food waste reduction initiative aimed at finding new outlets for food that is salvageable but being wasted out of the warehouse.
September 27, 2023
Check out the recording from the September 2023 Rural Community Action Assembly. Presenters shared their perspectives on labor shortages, population changes, and inclusive approaches to labor force participation.
August 16, 2023
Watch the recording from our August 2023 Rural Community Action Assembly to learn more about inclusive workforce models.
July 19, 2023
Tune into the recording from our July 2023 Rural Community Action Assembly focused on how rural communities are starting to assess their readiness to get and absorb soon-to-be-released federal funding for broadband infrastructure.
December 19, 2022
As Cristy Schmidt, Penn State Extension applied research educator, nears the end of her two-year term as the County Commissioners Association of Pennsylvania’s Extension fellow, the organizations announced a yearlong extension of her fellowship, moving the end date to Dec. 31, 2023.
December 12, 2022
The team discussed how they adapted the Coming Together curriculum for Penn State Extension, the reach and impacts of their work thus far, and their plans for taking it to a wider audience.
November 10, 2022
This article addresses the concept of scale: do we think about resilience as individuals, in communities, or at the city scale? And what happens to our thinking on resilience if we conceive of humans as integrated within the environments and ecologies we inhabit? Thinking about humans as a part of the natural world rather than outside of it (or trying to control it) lends a very different perspective to how we think about and build resilient communities.
November 10, 2022
Yolanda Gonzalez is an Urban Agriculture Specialist with Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) based in New York City. She works across NYC to build and support the "layered benefits" urban agriculture. This article highlights some of the work she has done to support network building and knowledge sharing to build more resilient urban food systems in the city, with a focus on collaborative and collective learning among growers and communities.
July 13, 2022
Capital access and absorption — systemic opportunity combined with the capacity and technical expertise to effectively leverage and deploy funds — are vital components of revitalization for rural communities. View the recording from the Rural Community Action Assembly.
June 22, 2022
Regional workforce models — leveraging cross-sector partnerships, employer-informed job training, upskilling and reskilling, along with community outreach through trusted institutions — are an important component of revitalization for rural communities. View the recording from the Rural Community Action Assembly.
June 8, 2022
Digital equity and inclusion — affordable access to broadband internet, technology and devices, and skills and literacy — are vital components of economic development for rural communities. Review the recording from the Rural Community Action Assembly.
March 24, 2022
Members of the CECD team are collaborating with soil scientists and communities in Philadelphia to develop an engaged approach to managing urban soils for safe and healthy urban agriculture.
March 21, 2022
For Dr. Kim Niewolny of Virginia Tech’s Center for Food Systems and Community Transformation, socially and spatially just agricultural systems are born through processes of crossing geographical “divides.”
March 21, 2022
Suzanne Weltman, an educator with Penn State Extension’s Food, Families, and Health unit, sees her role in this complex city system as a facilitator, linking communities to resources that they may not otherwise know about or have access to.
March 21, 2022
This brief article considers the concept of resilience through a social justice lens, asking how and whether resilience promotes socially and spatially just communities and societies that can equitably and effectively serve all people.
January 19, 2022
Hear about several data tools developed to help you engage with your local and regional population, quality of life, economic, and agricultural information.
January 7, 2022
Pennsylvania's labor economy showed resilience throughout the first two decades of the 21st century, with overall modest employment growth and relatively low joblessness by the end of 2019. But certain industry sectors and regions of the state continued along a trend line of job loss in the run-up to the COVID-19 pandemic, according to economists in Penn State's College of Agricultural Sciences.
October 20, 2021
Penn State Extension's Master Watershed Steward program works with resident volunteers in rural and urban communities across Pennsylvania to effectively manage watersheds, addressing issues such as stormwater overflow and different sources of pollution.
October 20, 2021
Improved access to nutritious food is one important outcome of urban agriculture; however, working collectively also has important social and economic implications.
October 20, 2021
Welcome to the first issue of the The Urban Resilience Report, a publication of the Center for Economic and Community Development and the Urban Resilience Working Group at Penn State. This report was born of the desire to create a platform to discuss and better understand urban community resilience.
July 15, 2021
This assembly was an examination of the role that equity plays in sustaining entrepreneurial ecosystems, tourism, and revitalization. View the recording from the Rural Community Action Assembly.
June 30, 2021
This assembly examined community capital ecosystems for regional revitalization, with an emphasis on the impact of partnerships between philanthropy, mission-based lenders, and local leaders on quality of life, job and population growth, and attracting external capital to a region. Watch the recording from the RCAA event.
May 20, 2021
This assembly examined rural workforce demand and supply, talent recruitment, a medical assistant apprenticeship model in Washington state, and community health worker models. Watch the recording from the Rural Community Action Assembly.
