It is now my ninth and last week of summer placement at the UW-Extension Natural Resources Institute (NRI) and I can finally say with pride that I am succeeding in my goal of developing logic models for each environmental program of the Institute’ land and water program area. I am also very close to completing the logic model for the Natural Resources Institute. But more than that, I finally put some faces to the programs.

It has been now over three weeks since I started the summer leadership placement at the Evaluation Unit of the UW- Extension Natural Resources Institute (NRI) and I must say, it has not been easy. As I mentioned in my first blog, I was overwhelmed by the amount of information I needed to process to accomplish my original goal of developing logic models for each of the Natural Resources Institute’s environmental programs, including an integrated logic model for the Institute. I spent a lot of time thinking how to begin, I made at least three different frameworks to organize data so it could be easier for me to integrate them into a final model. None of them was making sense and I was not feeling very optimist. I took a deep breath (or maybe five) and decided to stop thinking about the final result and just going step by step. I met with my host supervisor and he agreed that I should focus on the “land and water” program area of the NRI, and set aside other programs, centers and reserves. The “land and water” program area includes seven NRI branded programs: the Aquatic Invasive Species Program, the Water Action Volunteers Program, the North Central Region Water Network, the Regional Natural Resources Education Program, the Conservation Professional Training Program, the Wehr Nature Center Outreach Program and the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Program.