UMaine 4-H is working to allow youth better opportunities to connect to university level STEM resources, in order to inspire them to enroll in STEM programs when they get to college age.  Many students can’t come to a college campus, so we’re bringing college to them.  With  “4-H Follow a Researcher™” a student scientist is equipped with communications equipment so that wherever they are in the world they can engage in question and answer sessions with youth via twitter.  We pre-record videos about their projects that are aligned with Next Generation Science Standards Practices, showing that real science uses the processes that kids are learning about in school.  When the student researcher goes on a field expedition, we release the videos weekly, and facilitate live twitter chats. All that schools need to participate is an Internet connection.  Kids then see what the research process looks like, and meet a real student scientist working on cool research all over the world.   We are currently engaging almost 2000 students through 90 schools in seven states, and twitter chats are getting busy.  In order to expand to meet the needs of more teachers and students and have meaningful question and answer sessions, which would lead to youth better to learn from and relate to the student researcher, we need to engage more research universities to help them build their own FAR™ programs.  To expand from a program to a collective impact effort designed to engage youth in STEM (and inspire them to study STEM when they get to higher education), we need funding for communications coordination by a dedicated staff person.  This coordinator would begin to share our program with other researchers, engage our stakeholders in meaningful conversations on shared measurements of outcomes, engage new stakeholders also working on the STEM pipeline, and begin to communicate with our audience (teachers) the increased opportunities expanding the program would provide.  Not only would having a communications coordinator allow us to to begin this expansion process, but would also allow us to engage multiple universities and multiple student researchers.