The Latest Dirt - September 2024
How did the Contra Costa Master Gardener Help Desk get started?
The Help Desk has changed over the years. Emma Connery wasn’t there at the beginning, but almost…
The UC Master Gardener program in Contra Costa started in 1983. The intent in starting any program was to have volunteers support the county farm advisor by interfacing with the public on home garden issues. The farm advisor who took on this program was Demetrios Kontaxis. He was the only UC interface to the program, so he was the equivalent of our coordinator, but he did that along with his farm advisor duties. Because of the program’s original intent, I assume the Help Desk began at the same time or a year later.
I was in the class of ’94, so the program had been rolling along for 11 years prior. Kontaxis had just retired, and his replacement ran the program. The Help Desk at that time was one phone at a desk in a back room of the Cooperative Extension office.
Upon graduation, I was assigned the job of ‘librarian’ for the Help Desk, and so the Help Desk was where I began volunteering from the get-go. Remember, there were no computers or the Internet at that time. The only info one had access to was the ‘library.’ The library was maybe 10 books, and the many articles cut from newspapers that were not filed and just lying in a drawer. University research was published in paper format only. The research papers had a title and a publication number. A copy of all these publications was filed in the front office with the secretaries—rooms away from where the Help Desk resided. These publications primarily focused on crops, but some applied to home issues. The Help Desk didn’t even have a list of these publications. I don’t remember how I found out about them, but I do remember accessing them regularly, and I remember pulling copies of those applicable to the home and filing them at the Help Desk.
We must have kept at least a tally of calls, but I do not remember that detail. There was no training for the Help Desk. One did not ‘ride’ with an experienced CoCoMG—one was dropped in and expected to figure it out.
So…to answer the question, the Help Desk has been in operation since the program's inception, but it has no resemblance to today.