This article chronicles our efforts, operating as a team with other Extension educators, to work with nontraditional clientele. Our goal was to develop a training program focused on an analytical problem-solving model and interactive group processes for a city government eager to deal with the public and ongoing problems in a more proactive manner. The success or failure of Extension programs in public policy isn't necessarily a function of the quality of the decisions made by citizens and their representatives. Quality, like beauty, is in the eye of the stakeholder. However, the program's success in Fairfield depended on whether our training process "improved" the breadth of community participation and the depth of the discussion, and whether, and how well, participants were able to use the process when next faced with a tough issue. More knowledgeable problem solvers make better, more informed decisions-a core Extension mandate and a core tenet of the democratic process.
Rilla et al. (Tue,) studied this question.