UW Extension Service
This fall, the Wyoming Business Report honored University of Wyoming Extension educator
Mary Martin with a Lifetime Achievement Award for nearly five decades of service to the Teton
County community.
Martin’s achievements more than qualify her as a Wyoming Business Report Woman of
Influence. She started working for UW Extension in 1975 as a county home economist. Her first
class focused on teaching people how to use microwaves. “Sometimes people wonder, how
have you stayed in the same job for so long? But it hasn’t been the same job! I’m not doing the
same work that I did, even last year,” she says.
Martin’s work has spanned a huge breadth of topics. She has been involved in 4-H scholarships,
emergency management, community daycares, senior meal plans, low-income assistance and
mediation. She even helped recent immigrants get a basketball team started. Today, as a
community vitality and health educator, Martin is developing an online financial literacy course.
One of Martin’s personal highlights is her work with the Jackson Fall Arts Festival. In the 1980s,
she participated in community discussions focused on ways to bring more visitors and jobs to
Jackson in the fall. She came up with Quilting in the Tetons, an annual event that brought
together a community of quilters for a quarter of a century, bolstered the area’s economy and
empowered hundreds of participants.
Many of Martin’s projects have taken on a life of their own, enriching her community in many
domains. She comments, “In extension, we use the community’s talents and resources to
create community solutions to community problems.”
The fulfillment she’s found in her work extends well beyond Jackson. “Mary Martin represents
the very best of UW Extension,” says Mandy Marney, senior associate director of UW
Extension. “Throughout her tenure with our organization, she has created positive impacts not
only within the counties in which she has worked, but across the state.”
“I was really honored to be nominated for the Lifetime Achievement Award,” says Martin. “I’ve
been able to do an amazing amount of different kinds of things because of the resources of UW
Extension, and the fact that I live in a community that wants to make itself a wonderful place to
live and use those resources.”
About the University of Wyoming Extension
Since 1914, the University of Wyoming Extension has provided lifelong learning opportunities
to Wyoming citizens across the state. With roots in agricultural education, UW Extension
supports rural communities facing contemporary challenges and changes. UW Extension brings
the university’s resources to each of the state’s 23 counties and the Wind River Indian
Reservation. To learn more about the UW Extension, visit www.uwyo.edu/uwe or call (307)
766-5124.