Final report for ENC22-210
Project Information
This project resulted in the development and support of 7 Farm Law Leaders who delivered 8 farm law workshops on legal issues of importance to sustainable and direct to consumer farmers. As a result, 221 farmers have more stable businesses and improved quality of life. We achieved these outcomes by hosting the Legal Ecosystem Fellowship (previously called the Farm Law Leadership Group) a train-the-trainer program designed to foster the ability of respected educators to lead farm law workshops in local communities. The training curriculum emphasizes risk-reducing action steps and accurate, clear legal explanations. The program also trains Fellows to use peer-to-peer training techniques and supports farmers as co-contributors to the leadership program and resulting workshop template resources.
This program created a next-step leadership process for agriculture professionals who have been through our SARE-funded Guiding Resilience program (a 15-hour training commitment to gain a broad, accurate knowledge base, mainly as it affects diversified and direct-to-consumer farmers). These folks asked us for this program because they wanted to build on their knowledge by being able to deliver presentations. With a vast unmet need for more presentations on farm law matters, this was a perfect opportunity. The Fellowship created permanent leaders in agricultural law education while offering a template we are already replicating and in other regions of the country.
The primary output of this program is the following:
- 8 Farm Law Leadership Group trainees who are prepared to deliver up to 4 specific farm law trainings in their communities/states. Those workshops are:
- Farm Business Structure Basics
- Farm Employment Law Basics
- Injury Liability and Insurance Basics
- Farmland Leasing Basics
- At least 8 farm law workshops delivered to an average of 28 farmers per program, for a total of 221 direct to consumer and sustainable farmers reached with essential information with a track record of reducing risk in the near term.
We also created the Farm Law Leadership training:
- A 5-module curriculum for the Farm Law Leadership Group which will focus on a) building common purpose, b) understanding the value, risks, and opportunities in legal education c) providing folks with all the training necessary to confidently deliver the 4 workshops above, and d) an understanding of how diverse audiences come to legal education and how to meet the needs of underserved audiences.
- The training will also provide detailed information on why using peer-to-peer techniques in farm law education is essential, along with detailed information on when and how to incorporate these techniques.
To support the above, we implemented online infrastructure to support the training package above including the powerpoint decks, the scripts, the activity sheets, the step-by-step instructions for preparing for the presentation, and other supplementary resources. Fellows also have a process for getting review/approval of each presentation. We also created a process to annually update the curriculum, and keep distributing it to Fellows through an annual licensing process.
Education
We developed and delivered the 5-module curriculum to train our Legal Ecosystem Fellows (we changed the name from Farm Law Leaders). Each of the 5 sessions lasted 2 hours and consisted of interactive discussion, training, practice and skills sharing. Fellows also completed one hour of homework in advance of each session including assembling their own presentation and practicing delivering it. By the end of the training curriculum, Fellows had identified the presentations of most interest to their audience, practiced delivery of one or two presentations, and received feedback on their presentation. They also practiced adapting the presentation to their unique audience. They also considered strategies to incorporate farmer co-presenters and a module on compassionate communication into each of the 4 presentations!
At this point in the program, Fellows were ready to host their presentations in their community! Some Fellows delivered the curriculum exactly as written. Other Fellows made dynamic adaptations to reach unique audiences. Fellows delivered the curriculum in online and in-person formats, to large audiences of 100 and to small groups of 2 or more people.
Education & Outreach Initiatives
Prepare skilled and experienced farm educators/professionals to deliver accurate farm law presentations in their communities, while utilizing peer to peer education techniques.
The 5-module curriculum for the Legal Ecosystem Fellowship focuses on a) building common purpose, b) understanding the value, risks, and opportunities in legal education c) providing folks with all the training necessary to confidently deliver the 4 workshops below, and d) an understanding of how diverse audiences come to legal education and how to meet the needs of underserved audiences. The training also provides detailed information on why using peer-to-peer techniques in farm law education is essential with techniques on when and how to incorporate these techniques.
The curriculum contains 5 meeting agendas, 4 powerpoint decks with scripts and teachers manuals, activity sheets/handouts, and a guide to incorporating farmer co-presenters. The workshops Fellows are trained to deliver are as follows:
- Farm Business Structure Basics
- Farm Employment Law Basics
- Injury Liability and Insurance Basics
- Farmland Leasing Basics
We had envisioned a 5th presentation that acted as an overall summary of farm law, but it was unnecessarily excessive, considering needs. Four proved to be enough, as most Fellows identified that their community wanted material on business structures or leasing.
This curriculum was successful in building our Fellow's confidence and capabilities to deliver farm law educational workshops. 71% of participants identified that they were "much more confident" in their ability to deliver farm law trainings. 14% said they were "somewhat more confident" and one person ranked their confidence level the same before and after the training.
Although we had planned to reach 8 Fellows and we admitted 8 Fellows into the training process, one person was unable to complete the program. 7 Fellows "graduated" the Fellowship and went on to hold presentations in their communities. Some Fellows delivered the curriculum exactly as written. Other Fellows made dynamic adaptations to reach unique audiences. Fellows delivered the curriculum in online and in-person formats, to large audiences of 100 and to small groups of 2 or more people.
Educational & Outreach Activities
Participation Summary:
Learning Outcomes
Project Outcomes
This project was very popular! We received 30 applications for participation in the program, and we could only accept 8 people for the Fellowship training. This shows there is tremendous demand for agriculture professionals to be able to deliver educational programming in their community. As our first pilot of this project, we felt the training was a great success. The module and curriculum design worked very well. We were able to serve the 8 Fellows with focused, individual training. 7 are able to successfully go forward in serving their communities with legal knowledge.
Fellows made creative and insightful changes to the curriculum in adapting it to their communities, without compromising legal accuracy. They hosted 8 different programs, locally.
Here are quotes from our participants about their experience:
- Having slides that have sound legal information included on them prepped with tips on key phrasing included is especially helpful. No need to reinvent the wheel knowing that Farm Commons has already drafted slides!
- Being able to get feedback on our individual work was helpful, it allowed me to also gather ideas from what other people did or talked about after presentations.
- All of the resources and how they are organized is very very helpful. I do not always learn well in classroom situations and part of the value for me is access to all the resources that I can go back and look at. I also appreciate the network of folks that this fellowship has given me. I feel like I can reach out to any of my fellow program participants and get their advise if needed.
- Overall, just a lot of gratitude for FC for putting this together. I think it wouldn't be too hard to scale up some aspects of this with a larger cohort.
- I really appreciated the clear, well thought out information that was shared. I find the powerpoints to be useful tools but the homework and feedback really created a feeling of comfort with the material. That engagement was so valuable compared to just receiving the information. I also found the well thought out structure to be very useful in allowing me to prepare for each session.
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This has been a great opportunity to find supporting material for the farmers in our incubator program, and although it needs adaptation to account for language and literacy levels it provided a great base to start from.
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I enjoyed the way it was designed and the support material that it was created for us. I use part of it, and based on the info there, I was able to develop my own. I will keep using this information and materials for future presentations
We highlighted above some simple success stories- our Fellows significantly improved their confidence and were able to use the curriculum in a wide variety of ways to meet the needs of local communities. Below, we're including a story about a couple of Fellows that were able to really push the edges of what this project could do, and motivated us to seek additional funding to help it go even further.
Two of our Fellows came from an Iowa-based organization that supports immigrant and refugee farmers. This audience has a particular need for legal education because they don't have existing context for how the American legal system works and/or how businesses usually operate in the United States. Farm Commons and the two Fellows already had an existing relationship where Farm Commons would deliver legal education and the organization would provide simultaneous translation. We knew the limits of that approach- it was slow, cumbersome, and complex. Training these Fellows (who were also the people who did the simultaneous translation) to deliver the curriculum themselves promised to solve those problems- they could deliver the material in the native language of their audience without the simultaneous translation. BUT, what the Fellowship further provided was a lot of creative inspiration for the Fellows in how to continue adapting the presentations. They actually took out all the words (which were in English) from the presentation and replaced them with pictures, for low-literacy learners. They re-vamped some of the activities we developed (again, in English and using written words) to be picture-based and better suited to how their audience communicates. The Farm Commons staff and the other Fellows benefited tremendously from seeing these innovative expansions on the curriculum. It inspired us to think more deeply about how to adapt for various audiences.
It also revealed to us the extent to which the existing Fellowship experience and the curriculum were designed for English-speaking professionals who reach an English-speaking audience. That very real limitation wasn't something we had quite recognized before we saw Fellows try to adapt the material to English language learners. Having seen this enormous limitation, we went to work immediately to try and address it. We wrote a grant application to Northeast SARE's Professional Development program to develop a version of the Fellowship program exclusively for Fellows that are from and reach English language learner audiences, with an emphasis on low-to-no literacy learners. We anticipate it will be selected for funding, and the application has passed two rounds of review thus far.
We are eager to expand this project so we already applied for and received a grant to bring it to the Southern SARE region. We are cautiously beginning our planning as to whether and how to expand the total number of Fellows served. Having to turn away 20+ people who wanted this training doesn't feel good. But, there is still much we have to learn about train-the-trainer in farm law issues. We did have Fellows who made more complicated changes to their slides that did cause us a little anxiety in terms of insuring accuracy. We also found that people have important and individualized questions about delivering the curriculum. Thus, it remains to be seen how and how fast, we can scale up this program. Regardless, there's so much demand for this content!
We realized that this curriculum and program is not well suited to reaching farmers one-on-one. It really is a program to train agricultural professionals to reach farmers in a classroom style setting. One of our Fellows was unhappy with the program because she prefers to learn and to teach in one on one environments. But, this is very challenging for legal education. If it's conducted one-on-one, it risks becoming legal advice. We can't do that, and our Fellows can't cross that line either. So that was a point where we had to regretfully recognize that we couldn't meet the Fellow's needs or advise on adapting the curriculum in that direction. Providing one-on-one training will continue to be a sticking point when it comes to developing legal resilience.