Systems Change: Sounds great, but how do I do it?

Grow Your Impact with Community Gardens

from March 2008

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Community Gardens are a underutilized resource for Extension educational programming. While many communities have community gardens, Extension's involvement varies. Many times, schools, nursing facilities, hospitals or private landowners develop the gardens with no input from Extension. When Extension is involved it is most commonly only one agent or content area in the county that participates. Using Extension's wide content expertise, community gardens create ideal educational opportunities for practically all of the content areas of Extension: Nutrition, physical activity, youth development, entrepreneurism, horticulture, family resource management, community development, agriculture education, senior friendly communities, etc. A garden can be a powerful community hub for Extension education activities. Since community garden's will be at various stages of development, presentation and materials will be applicable for many stages, from planning, to partnership formation, to land and funding acquisition, to full fledge gardens, to redevelopment after land or leadership loss.

Intended Audience (Benefits)

This workshop will be for any experience level working in communities with children, youth and families. It will seek to both broaden basic understanding of community gardens. Participants will: Increase knowledge of gardening's benefit to children, youth, families and communities; increase knowledge of community garden's ability to integrate expertise of Extension; and gain access to web-based technical assistance materials

Presenters

Susan S. Jakes, Ph.D. Extension Assistant Professor, Family and Community Development Specialist
Department of 4-H Youth Development and Family & Consumer Sciences
North Carolina Cooperative Extension, CALS, NC State University

Keith R. Baldwin, Ph.D.
Program Leader ANR/CRD
Extension Specialist-Horticulture
North Carolina Cooperative Extension, North Carolina A&T University

Lucy Bradley, Ph.D.
Extension Specialist, Urban Horticulture
Department of Horticultural Science
North Carolina Cooperative Extension, North Carolina State University

Additional resources

Gardens PDF from session.

http://www.ces.ncsu.edu/depts/hort/garden/CommunityGarden/tools.html

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Archived Session

http://connect.extension.iastate.edu/p95292918/

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