2002 Walter Barnard Hill Awards for Distinguished Achievement in University Public Service & Outreach

Connie Crawley

Since joining the Georgia Family and Consumer Sciences Extension faculty in 1987, Connie Crawley has been instrumental in establishing Georgia’s Cooperative Extension Service as a national leader in diabetes education. She has gained national recognition for her expertise in the development of community programs, educational materials, and effective training approaches.

Possibly the best indication of Crawley’s accomplishments is the development of the Right Bite Diabetes Cooking Curriculum, which won the 1996 Creative Nutrition Award from the Diabetes Care and Education Practice Group of the American Diabetic Association. In addition to the Right Bite Curriculum, Crawley is the editor and principal writer of the Diabetes Life Lines Newsletter that has a circulation in Georgia of approximately 8,000 people. She developed the diabetic support group curriculum Diabetes Connections and the Walk-a-Weigh program showed that 59 percent of participants reduced their weight and blood pressure.

Crawley is recognized nationally as an expert in health and nutrition and is a consultant with the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) as well as the Georgia Department of Human Resources (DHR) and Department of Health. In 1999, she served as an education consultant for the National Diabetes Education Program, for which she trained staff from state diabetes control programs and other organizations on the use of the Diabetes Community Partnership Guide. That same year, she facilitated the development of a pharmacy, podiatry, optometry, and dentistry work group and created lesson plans and handouts for an entirely Web-based diabetes worksite education kit. She is currently on the curriculum development team for a UGA Family Research Center project that is being funded by the CDC and serves as chair of the Community Intervention Workshop for the DHR Diabetes Control Program. Crawley is also a facilitator for CDC Diabetes Today, a program that develops diabetes coalitions in Georgia. Crawley has coauthored one book, written three national journal articles, seven magazine articles, and given numerous national, and state presentations. In the past two years alone, she has generated over $136,000 in grants for diabetes education and research.