The requirement to collect demographic data, particularly race, ethnicity and sex of Extension program participants, is a condition of grant funding by U.S.D.A and its research agency, the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA). This requirement is expressed in 7 Code of Federal Regulation (C.F.R.) which effectuates Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. The same holds true for other recipients of grants and funding such as graduate students and faculty principal investigators (MAES and AGNR academic departments).
UME faculty use the University of Maryland Extension Reporting System (UMERS), a web-based system, to collect the following data:
- All UME educational program events in which there are direct teaching contact with participants. This includes events using distance technologies as delivery methods. With direct events, the number of participants and the ethnicity, race, and gender of the participants must be collected. Faculty must enter participant data by race and ethnicity for all teaching events on a monthly basis for the current year (January 1 – December 31).
- All UME indirect contacts through various social media are to be entered at the end of each month or at the end of the calendar year as bulk entries. Examples include television programs, radio programs, Facebook postings, tweets, and blogs. For indirect contacts, the estimated number of participant recipients should be entered on a monthly basis for the current year (January 1 – December 31).