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The Community Engaged Scholar Award recognizes faculty members who have demonstrated co-created engaged scholarship that has positively impacted communities. Community Engaged Scholars have made significant contribution to Ohio State's culture of engagement, further establishing, and strengthening the institution's commitment to communities.

Timothy McDermott, Assistant Professor, Extension Educator at The Ohio State University College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences/Extension

Extension is an outreach arm of the university, engaging our community using research-based information to positively impact residents lives. Dr. McDermott impacts through agriculture and its opportunities. He delivers neighborhood and place-based outreach, free of charge, in economically disadvantaged communities of color, primarily to BIPOC, New American, immigrant and refugee client residents and their children through the development of impactful programs, committed partnerships, and new friendships.

He co-led The Buckeye ISA project, a 2022 Ohio State High Impact Program awardee where he taught families with children in the Linden, South Side, near East Side, Hilltop and Franklinton neighborhoods how to grow their own food for personal and family food security. Outputs of this project included 124 new family farmers trained, 85 classes with 2,500 attendees, and $1,533,889.31 dollars leveraged locally in government funding, materials donation, monetary donations, volunteerism time, and grants.

He engages students and teachers in schools through STEM-based Ag in the Classroom programs creating indoor and outdoor agricultural experiential learning laboratories for the purpose of workforce development. McDermott has engaged over 80 schools including Columbus City, Reynoldsburg, Whitehall, The Ohio School for the Deaf and charter schools Columbus Adventist Academy, Midnimo Linden Academy and KIPP. He leveraged $450,000 in funding from USDA NIFA, Scotts-Miracle Gro, and the OSU Office of Diversity and Inclusion to provide materials and knowledge support to mitigate participation barriers by teachers that has engaged over 50,000 Franklin County youth.

This story covers activity that took place before June 27, 2025, when Ohio Senate Bill 1 took effect. CFAES has discontinued diversity, equity, and inclusion activities in compliance with the law.

The New Jersey Department of Agriculture and Rutgers Cooperative Extension Office of Urban Extension and Engagement invite urban farmers and growers to explore, use and share the new Urban Agriculture Strategies for the State of New Jersey Report and its associated web portal. The portal and the report that frames the Garden State’s challenges and opportunities, were developed as a partnership among NJDA, Rutgers, urban farmers, growers and other stakeholders engaged in urban agriculture advocacy, preservation, resources and policy. Read the full story.

Aftab Pureval, mayor of Cincinnati, sees opportunity for building back the strength of our democracy through local offices. As the former Hamilton County clerk of courts, he honed his skills of persuasion, bridge building and collaboration in a smaller, less scrutinized public office. He improved his ability to be risk tolerant; failure, he notes, is necessary for understanding improvement and innovation. Another discovery: It’s more powerful for a leader to say, “I don’t know” and to engage the team around him or her to get to the best answer. All these nuances of leadership in City Hall give him the opportunity and platform to improve the lives of Cincinnatians. Go to the podcast.

The vast majority of the state of Ohio is growing older, losing population, and losing workers — a trend offset only by growth happening mostly in Columbus and surrounding areas, a new report shows.

From 2000 to 2020, the state of Ohio saw its population grow by 3%, but if the city of Columbus and surrounding areas are removed from the equation, the rest of the state experienced population loss of about 1%, or 100,000 people, according to a new study from the nonpartisan nonprofit Greater Ohio Policy Center. Read the complete article.

Sourced from Ohio Capital Journal