CYFAR Professional Development Event 2025

The Juntos 4-H program is committed to empowering youth through education, leadership development, and community engagement. In collaboration with Purdue University, Indiana 4-H, and various community partners, the Juntos 4-H Initiative aims to expand opportunities for students. This presentation will highlight the strategic partnerships that ensure the program's sustainability, detailing how collaboration with educational institutions, local businesses, and community organizations fosters long-term success. Attendees will gain insights into best practices for establishing mutually beneficial partnerships that align with organizational missions.

Program evaluation is not only an opportunity to facilitate program improvement but can also be a key opportunity to empower participants. Engaging program evaluation can further facilitate participants' transition from passive subjects to active agents within programs. This interactive conference session will address the benefits of participatory evaluation approaches and demonstrate how to use “Evaluation Skill-a-Thons" as a complement to CYFAR Common Measures to actively engage participants at every evaluation process step. With the Evaluation Skill-a-Thon model, participants actively participate in each step of conducted the evaluation of their program - contributing, analyzing, and interpreting the data; proposing program changes from their findings; and designing subsequent evaluations. While the approach was initially developed to engage youth in evaluation, it can be valuable for participants of any age. Session attendees will leave with a series of interactive approaches to evaluation that they can implement in their own programs.  

The SEL Family Engagement Program for Families with Preschoolers is a seven-week, research-informed initiative developed by Extension professionals to promote social and emotional learning (SEL) among children ages 3–5 and their families. Grounded in the CASEL framework, the program provides developmentally appropriate and accessible SEL support to families in communities. Weekly 60–90-minute sessions include parent mini-lessons, interactive book reading, hands-on SEL activities, and family-centered discussions. This session highlights program design, implementation strategies, and implications for  family-centered SEL practice. Participants will gain practical tools for engaging families in SEL and fostering resilient learners prepared for the challenges and opportunities of tomorrow.

Spend time with your coach and other Sustainable Comunity Projects within your coaching group. Discuss challenges and opportunities, brainstorm ideas, and spend quality time together.

The University Of Arizona--Reducing Family Stress Sustainable Community Project uses a two-generation approach and multi-faceted program model to facilitate positive parent-child interactions and the emotional and financial wellbeing of the family. This program runs 4 to 6 8-week sessions a year, serving two Arizona communities with family-centered, intergenerational, and community-engaged programming with an emphasis on: positive parenting of teens, financial literacy/parenting, youth financial education, and community connectedness. The evaluation is led by the Community Research, Evaluation & Development (CRED) team, a UA resource, but supported by the entire CYFAR team. Evaluation of this program includes weekly formative evaluation and quality improvement, baseline and follow up surveys for adult and youth participants focused on topical content (e.g., financial literacy and family communication), as well as the CYFAR common measures. Additionally, we conduct a post-completion follow-up survey to see if the skills and knowledge addressed in the class are having a lingering effect. In this session, we’ll detail how the entire team works together to support evaluation, explain how we use technological tools to facilitate data collection, and highlight some of our findings.