Betsy has been programming in the areas of Strengthening 4-H Club’s Youth Development Efforts. This effort focuses on developing youth leaders, effective youth adult partnerships, and increasing youth engagement and involvement. Betsy collaborated with 5 adult leaders to develop additional project workshops to respond to the state-wide retention data that the majority of respondents identified trying new things as a primary reason they joined 4-H.

A second focus is Building on Community Assets and Youth Leadership Skills. This effort focuses on providing youth opportunities to practice leadership skills in ways that benefit the community and providing schools, community organizations and coalitions with accurate local survey data to improve their understanding of issues facing youth. Through this work Betsy collaborated with colleagues to administer, conduct, synthesize data from and develop a useful and in-depth report on the findings of the 2009 Southwest Wisconsin Youth Survey. Seven schools included this information in competitive grant applications. Information from SWYS was also compiled on the http://fyi.uwex.edu/swys. As the administrator of this website Betsy works to ensure the website is up-to-date and contains appropriate and useful information. In 2011, this website was visited 5,108 times. During almost 600 of those visits the user views one of the eight parent newsletters. These newsletters are written by UWEX colleagues using data from the survey.