Mary Arnold earns national 4-H Extension award

CORVALLIS, Ore. — Ten years ago, Mary Arnold attended a meeting that changed the course of her career.

Arnold, then an associate professor and specialist in the Oregon State University Extension Service 4-H Youth Development Program, listened to a presentation of impact evidence for various youth programs during a briefing of Oregon’s Youth Development Council.

“Dr. Arnold is an extremely positive representation of the caliber of research, teaching and outreach conducted by OSU faculty. The evidence for this success is shown in the adoption of the 4-H Thriving Model across the country and the enthusiastic engagement of 4-H programs to position 4-H as a positive youth development program.”

“When the presenters got to 4-H they said they were unable to locate any significant impact evidence,” Arnold said. “4-H is the oldest and the largest youth-serving organization, operating from our land grant universities, and yet, there was no established theory of change for how 4-H impacts the lives of youth. And thus, no way to systematically plan programs, nor measure the impact of the programs. It was at that moment that I decided we had to do better.”

That experience led to Arnold’s work on the 4-H Thriving Model, which started in Oregon and has spread throughout the United States. Arnold was recognized for this work with the Excellence in Extension Award from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, Cooperative Extension, and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities. She received the award at the APLU annual meeting on Nov. 12 in Seattle.

“Dr. Arnold is an extremely positive representation of the caliber of research, teaching and outreach conducted by OSU faculty,” said Ivory W. Lyles, vice provost for the OSU Division of Extension and Engagement and director of the Extension Service. “The evidence for this success is shown in the adoption of the 4-H Thriving Model across the country and the enthusiastic engagement of 4-H programs to position 4-H as a positive youth development program.”

Establishing the model

Arnold is a developmental scientist who has led positive youth development program development and evaluation in the OSU Extension 4-H program since 2000.

She started the 4-H Thriving Model with three goals:

Secure the science of youth development as the knowledge base for 4-H practice.
Use that base to build professional capacity for high quality professional youth development practice.
Measure the impact of improved practice on the developmental outcomes of youth who participate in 4-H.

Arnold began working on the model in earnest with a 2015 paper that made the case for using a program theory of change to guide 4-H program development, implementation and evaluation. A second paper in 2018 described the model and its grounding in developmental science. The model’s statistical structure was published in 2019.

Although the model was developed primarily for improving positive youth development practice in Oregon, interest grew quickly. Arnold began traveling to other state 4-H programs to introduce the model, share the research behind it and show how using the model in planning would improve both quality and impact.

Expanding the model

Since 2020 Arnold has received nearly $4 million from National 4-H Council to further develop and spread the 4-H Thriving Model across the 4-H system. The funding allows her to lead the 4-H Thriving Model/PYD Committee, represent 4-H in national youth development conversations and support related projects such as PYD Academies and the 4-H PYD Champion Network.

“There are over 80 PYD champions from 40 land grant universities working to support the consistent, correct and complete use of the 4-H Thriving Model to guide program development and evaluation across the country,” Arnold said. “The 4-H Thriving Model has unified the 4-H system around a common science-based understanding and is enhancing effective PYD practice in 4-H.”

Today the model is used in more than 40 4-H programs operated by land-grant universities founded under the Morrill Act of 1862 and at least two Historically Black Colleges and Universities founded under the second Morrill Act of 1890.

In 2020 Arnold wrote the white paper “Beyond the Gap: How America Can Address the Widening Opportunity Gap Facing Young People” for National 4-H Council. It was endorsed by leading positive youth development scholars and later developed into the peer-reviewed paper “America’s Moment: Investing in Youth Development to Transform Youth and Society.”

In 2023 she received approval from Springer Publishing to co-edit a 500-page handbook titled “A Handbook of Positive Youth Development for Practitioners: Practice Grounded in Science,” with publication expected in 2025.

Career and education

Arnold earned a bachelor’s degree in psychology from Western Washington University. She earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in human development and family studies, with a focus on adolescent development, from Oregon State University.

Previously titled OSU Extension developmental scientist receives national award for 4-H Thriving Model

4-H Thriving Model: Principles For Positive Youth Development

The 4-H Thriving Model, developed by OSU Extension’s Mary Arnold and now being adopted nationwide, takes the best of youth and adolescent development research and helps us understand what we need to do in our programs to have the biggest positive impact on our youth.

Transcript

We all know that 4-H works magic in the lives of youth. And the 4-H Thriving Model tells us how that magic happens. The 4-H Thriving Model takes the best of research in youth and adolescent development and helps us understand what we need to do in 4-H programs to make sure that we have the biggest impact on Oregon's youth that we can. The 4-H Thriving Model helps us know what to do in our programs. And this means that our 4-H professionals around the state, as well as the volunteers who work with us, can follow some basic principles for youth development. These principles are really important because we know when we put them into practice that young people grow and thrive.

A few of these principles are SPARKS, helping a young person find their passion and motivation and purpose in life. We do that through the projects that 4-H kids are interested in pursuing and learning about. We also want to make sure that every young person feels like they belong in 4-H. This means that they feel physically and psychologically and identity safe and that they matter among the 4-H community. And then finally, we wrap those young people with developmental relationships that help young people know that they're cared about, that challenges their growth, shares power for planning and voice, and shows them possibilities for the future. When our professional staff and our volunteers do high-quality 4-H programs following the 4-H Thriving Model, we know that young people will demonstrate outcomes that sets them up for success across their life. These outcomes include vocational or academic success, civic engagement, employability and economic stability, as well as happiness and well-being. The 4-H Thriving Model helps us know what to do in programs and as we do our programs better, more youth are impacted in a positive way across Oregon.

Mary Arnold

Youth Development & Evaluation Specialist

youth working on a project together around a table