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- Creators: Barrett, The Honors College
- Creators: Cruz-Torres, Maria
Description
Community gardens are used worldwide to promote sustainable, urban living. They can be used to improve the physical, mental, emotional, and social health of the gardeners and volunteers who utilize their grounds. The gardens may also have a positive impact on the local environment and wider community. This study examines a community garden seeking to expand its involvement in the local neighborhood and searching for ways to include local residents in garden related activities. To this end, the garden was waiting for approval on their non-profit, 501(c)3 status, and was seeking additional data on local residents and perceptions of the garden's activities. This thesis first reviews the literature on the benefits community gardens provide for the individuals living in their communities and their impact on urban development. The thesis then turns to an analysis of one garden, Mesa Urban Garden, rooted in the Downtown District of Mesa, Arizona, and how they are impacting their neighborhood and how garden organizers can respond in new and creative ways to local residents.
ContributorsBooher, Samantha Rose (Author) / Glick, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Dumka, Larry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
This honors thesis examines community gardens from throughout Phoenix, Arizona. It shows that community gardens have the potential to both support and hinder sustainability efforts, encourage community development, and increase food access. By measuring the temperature at various community gardens throughout Phoenix, AZ, community gardens were shown to minimize local effects of the urban heat island. Because they use water to survive and Phoenix, AZ is in a desert, this contributes to a depleting water supply. Interviews of gardeners from community gardens throughout Phoenix depicted that community gardens can provide sites for community development as well as promoting food access.
ContributorsBowersox, Diane Kathleen (Author) / Haglund, LaDawn (Thesis director) / Lyon, Mich (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / WPC Graduate Programs (Contributor) / School of Accountancy (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Community gardens are used worldwide to promote sustainable, urban living. They can be used to improve the physical, mental, emotional, and social health of the gardeners and volunteers who utilize their grounds. The gardens may also have a positive impact on the local environment and wider community. This study examines a community garden seeking to expand its involvement in the local neighborhood and searching for ways to include local residents in garden related activities. To this end, the garden was waiting for approval on their non-profit, 501(c)3 status, and was seeking additional data on local residents and perceptions of the garden's activities. This thesis first reviews the literature on the benefits community gardens provide for the individuals living in their communities and their impact on urban development. The thesis then turns to an analysis of one garden, Mesa Urban Garden, rooted in the Downtown District of Mesa, Arizona, and how they are impacting their neighborhood and how garden organizers can respond in new and creative ways to local residents.
ContributorsBooher, Samantha Rose (Author) / Glick, Jennifer (Thesis director) / Dumka, Larry (Committee member) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor) / Hugh Downs School of Human Communication (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor)
Created2014-05
Description
Community gardens have wide-reaching potential for addressing public health issues. However, of the thousands of gardens located in the United States, many lack rigorous planning and encounter crippling obstacles, like disinterest from community members, soon after implementation. This study created a processual typology to summarize steps in the implementation process for existing gardens described within peer-reviewed, academic journals and offers recommendations for more sustainably planning future garden projects up to ten years in advance. A systematic review was conducted to identify descriptions of community gardens in peer-reviewed, academic literature. A general logic model was used as a basic structure and themes for each step (inputs, activities, outputs, short/long term outcomes, impacts, and methods of evaluation) were summarized from the included studies to construct a processual typology for evaluating community garden implementation in the United States. This typology was then used to assess a case study of a garden in Des Moines, Iowa, which generated the author's interest in conducting this research after assisting with that space through an AmeriCorps community health program. Results showed that existing gardens shared common attributes and could be categorized according to one of two speeds of implementation ("regular" or "accelerated") and according to one of three types of organizational structure ("grassroots," "externally-organized," or "externally-managed"). The typology was assessed for limitations from having been based on a systematic review of only peer-reviewed, academic articles and, referring to its themes, was used to construct a logic model for a hypothetical community garden project. The processual typology developed in this study is limited in its power to summarize all existing community gardens but offers a first step toward informing the creation of logic models for future projects in order to improve sustainability and attain more funding.
ContributorsOlivas, Elijah Taylor (Author) / Magaña, Lisa (Thesis director) / MartÃÂnez, AirÃÂn (Committee member) / School of Human Evolution and Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2017-05
Description
Abstract
Local organic gardening once experienced great popularity with Americans. At one time promoted and prominent, local gardens became obscure, old-fashioned, and outmoded. However, in the last few decades, for various reasons, local organic gardening has made some progress. This study seeks to assist high-density, low-income, inner-city Americans, who often do not have have easy or affordable access to fresh whole food by creating sustainable, resilient, local, urban gardens. However, this effort does not attempt to address the needs of entire populations of census tracts, rather one suburban home, one small apartment complex, or one small community garden. O ne solution to the problems associated with food insecurity is to put the creativity and responsibility into the hands of those who need the food, allow them to work within a self-sustaining garden, and decide what to do with any excess food. W ith the help of Greg Peterson, Phoenix’s own urban farmer, this project set out to create a system using Phoenix’s limited amount of rainfall to create a aquaponic gardening system which will be used in micro-communities such as multi-family complexes, middle schools, or high schools, in order to help grow food for these communities and alleviate some of the difficulties of finding fresh food in the desert.
Local organic gardening once experienced great popularity with Americans. At one time promoted and prominent, local gardens became obscure, old-fashioned, and outmoded. However, in the last few decades, for various reasons, local organic gardening has made some progress. This study seeks to assist high-density, low-income, inner-city Americans, who often do not have have easy or affordable access to fresh whole food by creating sustainable, resilient, local, urban gardens. However, this effort does not attempt to address the needs of entire populations of census tracts, rather one suburban home, one small apartment complex, or one small community garden. O ne solution to the problems associated with food insecurity is to put the creativity and responsibility into the hands of those who need the food, allow them to work within a self-sustaining garden, and decide what to do with any excess food. W ith the help of Greg Peterson, Phoenix’s own urban farmer, this project set out to create a system using Phoenix’s limited amount of rainfall to create a aquaponic gardening system which will be used in micro-communities such as multi-family complexes, middle schools, or high schools, in order to help grow food for these communities and alleviate some of the difficulties of finding fresh food in the desert.
ContributorsField, John William (Author) / Hagen, Bjoern (Thesis director) / Kelley, Jason (Committee member) / School of Public Affairs (Contributor) / School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning (Contributor) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2018-05
Description
Research demonstrates that the contemporary global food system is unsustainable, and moreover, because some groups carry the burden of that unsustainability more than others, it is unjust. While some threads of food activism in the United States have attempted to respond to these structural based inequalities--primarily those of race, ethnicity, and social class--overall, very little domestic activism has focused on issues of gender. As feminist scholarship makes clear, however, a food movement "gender gap" does not mean that gender is irrelevant to food experiences, social activism, or agricultural sustainability. Building on a framework of feminist food studies, food justice activism, and feminist social movement theory, this dissertation makes the case for "(en)gendering" the domestic alternative food activist movement, first by demonstrating how gender shapes experiences within food movement spaces, and second, by exploring the impact that an absence of gender awareness has on the individual, community, and organizational levels of the movement. Employing a feminist-informed hybrid of grounded theory and social movement research methods, field research for this dissertation was conducted in community gardens located in Seattle, Washington and Phoenix, Arizona during the summers of 2011 and 2012. With the assistance of NVivo qualitative data analysis software, field notes and twenty-one key-informant interviews were analyzed, as were the discourses found in the publically available marketing materials and policies of domestic food justice organizations. This study's findings at the individual and community level are hopeful, suggesting that when men are involved in food movement work, they become more aware of food-based gender inequalities and more supportive of women's leadership opportunities. Additionally, at the organizational level, this study also finds that where food sovereignty is influencing domestic activism, gender is beginning to enter the discussion. The project concludes with policy recommendations for both community gardening and food justice organizations and the detailing of a new concept of "feminist food justice", with the end goal of preventing the food movement from undermining its own potential to secure a "real alternative" to corporate industrial agriculture.
ContributorsWoodbury, Alicia (Author) / Cruz-Torres, Maria (Thesis advisor) / Weitz, Rose (Committee member) / Wharton, Christopher (Christopher Mack), 1977- (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
Description
This thesis project utilizes Bolman & Deal’s (2017) four frames to analyze how the Internship experience at TigerMountain Foundation, a South Phoenix community garden nonprofit, can be optimized to help the organization more effectively reach its goals. A brief explanation of the organizational context and structure is given as well as an overview of the relationship between community gardening and decreasing recidivism, as well as TigerMountain’s position in a food desert. TigerMountain Foundation can ultimately be framed internally as a human resource and symbolic organization and externally as a political organization. The Internship program presents a political benefit to the organization and can benefit from some human resource and structural additions to the onboarding process and overall experience. The recommended additions include providing a thorough onboarding packet to Interns at orientation that includes a questionnaire, includes a brief overview of the organization in human resource framing, a contact sheet, and instruction sheets for commonly used systems. Other additions to the Internship experience include setting up a ratio of how many Internship hours can be earned at the gardens and farmers’ markets compared to working administratively, requesting that Interns send in their updated availability weekly for scheduling purposes, and the implementation of an “on-call” system for farmers’ market shifts.
ContributorsMason Johnston, Laurel Miranda (Author) / deLusé, Stephanie (Thesis director) / Gross, Jamesha (Committee member) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / School of Politics and Global Studies (Contributor) / School of Human Evolution & Social Change (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2021-05
Description
Working in collaboration with the Clark Park Community Garden (CPCG), we sought to identify and implement practices and creative processes that increase community involvement and connection by further transforming the space into a community gathering place. Our primary goal was to foster greater community involvement within the garden through various methods while exploring our own creative outlets to represent what the concepts of “community” and “garden” mean to us.
When initially planning our project, we outlined a research process to conduct interviews with garden participants to determine the best practices for community garden connection-making. However, after our initial discussions with the CPCG Advisory Committee, it became clear that their goals could be better achieved through an applied project focusing on increasing community connection than from a research project. We have adopted our former research question--which asked how community gardens could serve as a means for community connection-- as our premise, and we seek to build upon it through the creation of programs, partnerships, and pieces of art that collectively expand the garden’s connection to its surrounding community. To begin this process, we worked with the leaders of the CPCG to identify the group’s main goals that they sought to achieve with our support. In collaboration with the CPCG Garden Advisory Committee, the three goals that we identified were: 1) increasing neighborhood participation in the space, 2) launching the site’s new subscription program, and 3) transforming the garden space into a place of community.
When initially planning our project, we outlined a research process to conduct interviews with garden participants to determine the best practices for community garden connection-making. However, after our initial discussions with the CPCG Advisory Committee, it became clear that their goals could be better achieved through an applied project focusing on increasing community connection than from a research project. We have adopted our former research question--which asked how community gardens could serve as a means for community connection-- as our premise, and we seek to build upon it through the creation of programs, partnerships, and pieces of art that collectively expand the garden’s connection to its surrounding community. To begin this process, we worked with the leaders of the CPCG to identify the group’s main goals that they sought to achieve with our support. In collaboration with the CPCG Garden Advisory Committee, the three goals that we identified were: 1) increasing neighborhood participation in the space, 2) launching the site’s new subscription program, and 3) transforming the garden space into a place of community.
ContributorsMercer, Madeline (Co-author) / Shea, Jacqueline (Co-author) / Cloutier, Scott (Thesis director) / Vitullo, Juliann (Committee member) / School of Sustainability (Contributor) / Department of Psychology (Contributor) / Barrett, The Honors College (Contributor)
Created2020-05