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Attract, Promote and Educate: The Hawaii Risk Management Education Model

Andrea Kawabata and Jensen Uyeda

Summary

Knowledge, understanding, and subsequent use of crop insurance were historically limited in Hawaii. Feedback and anecdotal evidence from educational efforts conducted by the Targeted States Risk Management Hawaii (RMH) project suggested that crop insurance products and activities be modified to better fit Hawaii’s diversified agricultural industries. Workshop participation and increasing risk management awareness was challenging due to prevailing attitudes. In 2009, 40% of participants indicated learning 1-2 new risk management strategies with potential on farm application, 39% indicated learning 3-4 new things, and 12% indicated learning 5 or more new things that could be applicable (48 workshops, 730 attendees).

The RMH program formally partnered with the Local and Immigrant Farmer Education (LIFE) program in 2010. LIFE is a team of Cooperative Extension Service agents and specialists with an established network of government and industry partners and a solid reputation for delivering timely, useful, quality outreach and education to Hawaii’s producers. Together, the LIFE-RMH partnership, or Team LIFE, developed an ATTRACT, PROMOTE & EDUCATE strategy to deliver crop insurance and risk management training to Hawaii’s producers. Team LIFE capitalized on LIFE’s reputation and proven ability to ATTRACT producers using topics producers found interesting and relevant, and coupled this with the technical expertise, knowledge, and resources of the RMH program to PROMOTE & EDUCATE. As a result, based on the 2012 workshop evaluations (80 workshops offered, approx. 1800 participants), growers indicated learning an average of 5-9 new risk management strategies with potential on-farm application.

Details

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