A Writing Retreat for Extension Professional Development Capacity Building: A Case Study of Arizona Cooperative Extension’s 4-H Youth Development Program

Extension Professionals have varying expectations of academic publication depending on tenure and promotion. And, the field of Extension needs the contributions of professionals across the system to support the translation and dissemination of the impacts of and findings from their Extension programming for academic and practitioner audiences. A writing retreat was held to support 4-H Youth Development professionals in academic writing. Because of this writing retreat five teams started working on an academic writing project which resulted in three journal articles being published. Teams also published conference presentations and Extension publications as a result of the initial academic writing project. Intentionally providing writing retreats that prepare professionals to write can support effective capacity building for academic publishing.