The Alabama Cooperative Extension System provides educational outreach to the citizens of Alabama on behalf of the state’s two land grant universities: Alabama A&M University, the state’s 1890 land-grant institution, and Auburn University, the 1862 land-grant institution.The system employs more than 800 faculty, professional educators and staff operating in offices in all of Alabama’s 67 counties and in nine urban centers located in major regions of the state. In conjunction with the Alabama Agricultural Experiment Station, the system also staffs six Extension and Research Centers located in all of the state’s principal geographic regions.Since 2004, Alabama Extension has functioned primarily as a regionally-based system through which the bulk of educational programming is delivered by agents operating across a multi-county area and specializing in a particular field. Even so, county Extension coordinators and, in cases where funding is available, county agents, continue to play integral roles within the Extension mission, working with regional agents and other Extension personnel to deliver services to clients in their areas.Alabama Extension, which will mark its centennial in 2014, possesses a history deeply rooted in the impoverished post-Civil War conditions of the rural Deep South. When the foundations of Extension work were being laid in the state, Alabama was still reeling from the lingering economic dislocation and depravation associated with post-war conditions. A major focus of Extension work at that time was on using cutting-edge research from the state’s expanding land-grant university system in tandem with emerging Industrial Age technology to improve the working conditions of the state’s farmers and homemakers.Today, Alabama Extension faces many of the challenges also common among Extension programs in other states, namely rethinking and expanding its mission to address the needs of a state that is increasingly more affluent, urbanized and racially and ethnically diverse. Many of Alabama Extension’s priority program areas are targeted to traditional audiences in rural parts of the state, but an increasing focus is on reaching nontraditional clients in urban areas of Alabama.Moreover, capitalizing on rapid advances in communications technologies, Alabama Extension, like many of its counterparts in other states, increasingly is expanding its mission to reach regional, national and even worldwide audiences.