Purdue Extension provides education to people
of all ages in indiana's 92 counties. The
community is our classroom where we provide
education that helps families strengthen, spend
smart, eat right, and live well. Purdue Extension
programs are offered across the state of Indiana
through our Purdue Extension Health and Human
Science extension educators that are located in
all 92 counties of the state of Indiana. To get
connected with your local extension office you
can go to our website and
click your location and you can find out who your local
contact is for the College of Health and Human
Sciences in your community. I also encourage
you to take a look to our website at all of the
programs that we have available and through our
website you can find out if there are cost for
our programs many of our programs are free but
there are few of them that have cost Associated
with them so check out the website for more
information. We offer a variety of programs to
help people meet their new year's resolution. If
families are looking to strengthen their family
relationships we offer
a program called Strengthening Families and that
program is available for parents and young people
ages 10 to 14. It's really a program that brings
parents and young people together to work on
communication skills to help those young people
learning how to deal with peer pressure and then
how to have those conversations with mom and dad
at home about the things they are feeling and
then the parents to share with the young people
how they're feeling. This is one of the number one
programs in the country that shows that it
prevents long-term substance abuse and risky
behavior.
So all of us as parents sometimes need those
extra tools in our tool box to help us so if one
of them is strengthening your parenting skills
into the next year our program strengthening
Families 10-14 might be a great option. We
also offer an opportunity if eating healthy or
making some some dietary changes is on your new
year's resolution I encourage people to visit
our website. We have a whole bunch of what we call
Kitchen Clips. They're great little videos that
are quick and easy recipes to help you meet
those new year's resolutions. So quick things,
maybe you want a quick, healthy breakfast-one of my
favorite recipes is omelet muffins. You can
make them ahed, freeze them, pull them out in the
morning right before you head out to school or to
work, and it's a quick healthy option that you can
prepare ahead of time. We also offer a program
called Mental Health First Aid. This is a program
that can help people who might be in
situations where they need to help people who are
dealing with anxiety or stress or potentially a
mental health crisis. We think about
CPR being sort of commonplace. Lots of people are
trained in CPR. Think of Mental Health Frst Aid
as a program that you can be trained in to help
someone just get them to the health care services
that they need. It's sort of that way how
do you listen to someone or help someone who
might have stress, anxiety, or mental health issues
and this is the way that we train people to
help them work with others who may be in need to
ultimately get them to the professional help that
they could use.
As we move into 2019 you might be asking yourself "where
does your money go?" Well Purdue Extension offers a
program that helps individuals and families think
"where does my money go?" It helps us think how
do we spend our money and how might we budget
and invest so that we have the resources that we
need in the future to pay our expenses. So
sometimes we just need to step back, take a look
at our personal finances, and our program Where
Does Your Money Go? can help. Recently the
Strengthening Families program was offered in
Tippecanoe County and one of the families that
participated in it - when they completed
the program, they said to themselves "wow, now as a
family we're really gonna take time to have what
we call family meetings." Which is the time when
you sit down together as a family and share your
feelings and your concerns, and every member of
the family has an equal time to do that. So
whether you're the child, or the adult it's sort
of that free zone where people can share freely.
And after participating in our Strengthening
Families program, this one particular family
said "wow, now we're taking time to have family
meetings every day, and we're sharing
as a family about what's happening in our lives."
If you can't think of a new year's resolution, I
have a good way for you to remember one. Purdue
is celebrating their 150th
anniversary this year. So, think: 2019,
Purdue University is celebrating their
150th birthday, you need to try to get
150 minutes per week of physical
activity.
