Amazing Agents

There are 312 UGA Extension agents spread across the state covering the program areas of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Family and Consumer Sciences, and 4-H Youth Development. They serve as educators, advisors, friends, neighbors and community leaders. In fiscal year 2019, agents led 24,277 educational outreach programs and made nearly 2 million contacts with Georgians across the state.

No matter what program area they cover, an agent's core responsibility is providing connections — connections between the university and communities, between stakeholders within their communities, and between communities in Georgia. Those connections help build the capacity of their friends and neighbors to improve their communities. Those connections help us build a better Georgia from the ground up.

LAURIE MURRAH-HANSON, 4-H YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AGENT, FULTON COUNTY

LAURIE MURRAH-HANSON

4-H YOUTH DEVELOPMENT AGENT, FULTON COUNTY

For the past three years, Laurie Murrah-Hanson has connected University of Georgia Cooperative Extension’s rural roots to metro Atlanta’s population by building a little UGA Extension outpost in the middle of Buckhead at the Atlanta History Center.

Murrah-Hanson, who serves as a 4-H Youth Development agent in Fulton County, has worked to grow the Georgia 4-H Club at the Atlanta History Center to include hundreds of students. These are students who weren’t being served by Georgia 4-H in metro Atlanta because it had been impossible for agents to make it up to schools in northern Fulton County from the county office in East Point. Kids couldn’t make it to the south end of the county either.

“Fulton County is 70 miles long with a million people, and when we had just one 4-H agent in College Park, they weren’t able to serve a very large geographic area,” Murrah-Hanson said. “Having me at the history center has allowed us to expand our Georgia 4-H program north. It’s helped us engage new schools. It’s helped us engage new families. It’s helped us engage new community partners that we hadn’t worked with before.”

Through a partnership with the history center, UGA Extension and Georgia 4-H have a presence in north Atlanta, and north Atlanta residents have access to the types of Extension services that families in rural areas have relied on for years — canning classes, soil testing and Georgia 4-H youth programming.

“For me, this is about bringing people together from all over the state to experience things together, it’s about people and helping people meet each other and understand each other,” said Sheffield Hale, president of the Atlanta History Center.

“Our communities are fragmented, and our state can feel fragmented. Anything we can do to help to stitch our state together and help us all realize that we are one state is something we want to be a part of. We have to work together to build a better Georgia.”

STEVEN PATRICK

COUNTY EXTENSION COORDINATOR, HABERSHAM COUNTY

While many University of Georgia Cooperative Extension agents spend their site visits collecting insects or soil samples, County Extension Coordinator Steven Patrick’s site visits include pulling fish from the Upper Chattahoochee and Soque rivers in Habersham County.

A fisheries biologist by training, Patrick has built partnerships with Habersham County’s angler community, farmers and conservation researchers from nearby universities to help document and celebrate the diversity of fish in Habersham’s rivers. His work has been key to investigate the genetics and distribution of two endemic species: Chattahoochee bass and shoal bass.

The result has been a renewed civic pride in the natural environment that has helped build Habersham County’s reputation as a premier destination for sport fishing. It has also garnered grant money for county watershed restoration projects that have led to the removal of the county’s waterways from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s list of impaired waters.

“(Our data) has helped us attract more than $190,000 in grant money to help the county with watershed restoration,” Patrick said. “For me, it’s important as an ag agent because it keeps the door open to getting watershed grants so we can do farm projects and stormwater projects. We’re bringing that money into our county to do watershed work based on that data. The data is important to fisheries science and for our local community.”

This summer, Patrick helped catch, tag and release more than 900 bass as part of a genetics research project focused on native bass. He has anglers of all ages and from all over the community come out to help during his weekly research “floats.”

“It's cool for educating the kids,” he said. “It helps them realize that science is important.”

STEVEN PATRICK — COUNTY EXTENSION COORDINATOR, HABERSHAM COUNTY

TAMMY CHEELY — AGRICULTURE AND NATURAL RESOURCES AGENT, WARREN COUNTY

TAMMY CHEELY

COUNTY EXTENSION COORDINATOR, WARREN, GLASCOCK AND HANCOCK COUNTIES

The truth is that when good things happen in a community, it’s almost always because a group of individuals and organizations came together to make it happen. All they need is someone to unite them.

That’s where University of Georgia Cooperative Extension agents like Tammy Cheely (BSA – Animal Science, ‘90; MAEX – Agricultural Extension, ‘94) come in. Cheely has served as the Agricultural and Natural Resources agent in Warren County since the early 1990s. During that time, she’s been an adviser, a confidant and a community organizer. She’s worked with the school district, the business community, and county government leadership.

Long story short, Cheely — like many UGA Extension agents across the state — acts as a bridge between stakeholders to help her community to achieve more.

“Our Extension office really thinks outside of the box to get things done. They are good at working with the whole community, not just the farming community,” said John R. Graham, chairman of the Warren County Commission.

From fostering partnerships between the county’s school system and business and farming communities to building one of the state’s most recognized farm-to-school programs to working with the U.S. Army Reserves and county and school officials to bring two weeks of free medical care to rural Georgia, big things can happen when Cheely helps connect the caring people in her community.

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