Filtering by
- Creators: Department of Psychology
- Creators: Cruz-Torres, Maria
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.
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.