Spotlight on Staff - Judy Chambers
by Linda Hudkins
Judy Chambers knows about a lot of community issues, the problems they face and the ways to find solutions.
In an early career she was a classroom teacher. In her second career as a municipal manager for communities in Pennsylvania and Maryland, she amassed knowledge of how communities and their residents function and how government can help or hinder their progress.
In the couple years since she started working as an educator for Penn State Cooperative Extension’s Community and Economic Development, she’s learned something else. As she tells it, the best part of her job is bringing the right people to the public table so they can collaborate for the greater good.
For example, she says, some people in Franklin County, who were interested in land use education, asked her to present a series of workshops with specific topics. “Yes,” she told them before adding a condition to the agreement. “It needs local folks on board who see the need for it.”
So they chatted with local leaders and found some to host the sessions. It all started gradually with a half dozen people who were very serious about growth pressures in the county. The group consisted of people who knew each other from various community organizations and who shared concerns over burgeoning populations. But they had never actually sat together to discuss the problems they believed may have been looming.
Planning strategically to get the right people sitting at the table is the key to and effective group, Chambers says. Her job with Cooperative Extension does not mean she’s going to join public boards and committees to take a stand on issues, she says. But she does help educate the public and civic leaders on how to put together a group, how to keep it functioning, how to assess their needs and decide on what programming is needed. “It’s about building capacity,” she says.
It’s no surprise, then, that one of her favorite aspects of Extension’s economic and community development component is the master facilitator program. Sadly, she says, she doesn’t have enough hours in the day to become fully active in the program but seeks every opportunity to hone her skills by working in the shadows of others who do it well.
On a recent summer evening, Chambers was headed out to Dauphin County to facilitate a meeting on trails at the request of the state Department of Conservation and Natural Resources. She said an already-formed group needed a fresh perspective on the work they were doing.
But the trip wasn’t entirely about trails, she says. It was also about exploring ways to work with the state agency, particularly on one of her favorite projects, namely, land use planning and land use initiatives outside state park properties.
She also made a presentation to the Pennsylvania State Association of Township Supervisors about alternate energy—ethanol, biofuels and wind farms—which included a segment on community process. She told them, “You don’t have to become an instant energy expert but you do need to understand … the potential issues for the community.” She explained that all voices need to be heard and that the kinds of impact that may be felt in the community that go beyond environmental impacts.
Chambers says she is constantly amazed by Cooperative Extension.
“For as large an organization as it is, it’s pretty agile,” she says.
“We are able to respond to issues as they come up.” Those contemporary and diverse issues stem from topics that pop up in the news on a daily basis including natural gas, food safety and emergency preparedness.
Chambers takes her lead from Extension and stays flexible and informed as she assists community after community with their problems. “Extension has a lot of resources and people to (help communities) go through the process,” she says, adding that it doesn’t matter whether the issue is a proposed casino in a historic district or a proposed ethanol plant that neighbors don’t understand.
Acknowledging that many issues can create volatility in a community, Chambers says she and her Extension colleagues won’t take a position one way or another. But what they will do is “make sure the community remains intact in a healthy way.”