Community Gardens

In preparation for the grant proposal (due today!), our group has looked over the Community Gardens project, and even modeled our own grant proposal around some of the main tenets of the Community Gardens project. Here is a brief overview of Community Gardens.

The vision of the project is to increase opportunities for Utahns in low-income neighborhoods to participate in gardening to improve health.

Goals:
1. Educate the public about the value of gardening to improve healthy eating and physical activity patterns and the availability of community and at-home gardening resources.

2. Create new community partnerships and a policy team to develop community gardens and home gardens in low-income neighborhoods in Salt Lake and Weber Counties.

3. Improve access to healthy options by working together with low-income neighborhood leaders and community members to develop community gardens, offer gardening workshops, and provide technical assistance for at-home and community gardens.

Stakeholders for this project included KUTV2 News and Univision (a Spanish language media partner), Governor Huntsman's Office, Utah DOH, Wasatch Community Gardens, Utah Department of Agriculture and Food, Utah Department of Human Services, Utah Commission on Aging, the SLC Mayor's Office, Weber-Morgan Health Department, 5 A Day Association of Utah, IFA, Girl Scouts of America, University of Utah, Utah State University - Extension, and Borski Organic Farms.

It is obvious that this project reached far into community organizations to build support among those who were already plugged into potential community resources.

The project's activities included collecting proposals from community organizations throughout the state to start community gardens. 10 proposals were selected and funding was provided to develop community gardens associated with schools, churches, low-income housing communities, and boys and girls clubs. The aim of the project was to target low-income communities, and with the exception of a charter school, all of the projects had access to low-income participants. A tool library was maintained in case additional supplies were needed. They could be borrowed by an individual project and then returned.

The intitiative can be compared to Wasatch Community Gardens, which is a group of community gardens thoughout the state. One of the aims of this program was to strengthen the capacity of Wasatch Community Gardens.

As far as evaluation, the final report from the project states that evaluation fell outside the timeline of the project. That sounds like a cop-out, and I hope that evaluation has been performed to determine if future efforts should be made to expand upon this program.