Committee

The Community and Economic Development (CED) Committee serves as the link between EDEN and Extension professionals whose work focuses on community and economic development. Our members focus on all four disaster phases: preparedness, response, recovery, and mitigation. CED Committee members build institutional knowledge of best practices and programs by facilitating all-hazard planning, building community capacity, and managing volunteers. Through collaboration with other committees, we support a multi-disciplinary approach to disaster education.

Priority Areas

Connect with and recruit Community and Economic Development colleagues.
We hope to grow our group, which will enable us to elevate the work of our commitee, grow and diversify our areas of focus, and collaborate more with the other committees.

Develop and test a method to collect outcome indicators from EDEN member institutions.
Create a CED Committee resource guide. We envision this resource guide to be a go-to source of information about EDEN, our committee, and CED disaster programs for current and new committee members.

Continue to grow our presence on the EDEN website.

Accomplishments

Over the past several years, the Community and Economic Development Committee has worked together to share, expand, and create programming in disaster education. Focusing on the strengths of committee membership, programs have linked to Regional and National Extension Programming Models to ensure that EDEN delegates who use the materials will be able to report impacts consistent with federal reporting requirements.

CED Committee members have been active in delivering many disaster preparedness workshops, including the EDEN Curriculum, “Ready Business.” This workshop was developed in partnership with the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and can be delivered in a 2-3 hour timeframe. Designed for small businesses, the content can also be used for not-for-profit agencies, and it walks participants through the process of developing a continuity of operations disaster plan. This program can be delivered as a stand-alone program or as part of a larger community effort in disaster preparedness.

Since many CED Committee members are well versed in participatory planning processes, it is natural for the CED Committee to have many related activities in their repertoire. These include the “Ready Community” process for community planning; Extension-led development of Community Organizations Active in Disasters (COADS); and many other localized planning processes. Information on these programs are available on the EDEN website, with the localized planning processes shared as a courtesy among PAWG Members.

With the large number of disaster related activities and programs going on across the nation tied to CED work, the CED Committee developed a tool to collect impact measures across the EDEN CED delegates. Designed specifically for CED processes and programs, this tool allows the CED Committee to aggregate the impact delegates contribute on a national scale. The impact indicators align with regional indicators, but they also expand to include both population and geographic numbers to indicate the magnitude of planning processes.

Membership

The Community and Economic Development Committee invites any Extension professional with an interest in community and economic development to join our group. To join, send an email to the CED Committee Chair, the National EDEN Project Coordinator, your state Point of Contact, or any other EDEN delegate. We will add you to the email group, and you will be set. If you are not a delegate yet, contact your state POC to get that process started; you can join the conversation before becoming an official delegate.