Description
Despite overwhelming evidence of community garden participation's individual and community benefits, long waiting lists indicate those benefits remain unrealized for many residents. Community groups and nonprofit organizations, historically responsible for creating these gardens, are not equipped to provide access on a city scale; furthermore, even the most active gardens are regularly lost to land development pressures. This study explores how these gardens serve as adaptable systems that provide a variety of services, with a focus on a garden's utility for meeting the multi-layered needs of Latin American immigrant communities, such as access to culturally appropriate foods, integration, and cultural identity preservation. The research explores the expansion of garden access through municipally-managed parkland-based community gardens. It considers the benefits and challenges of this type of community gardens and compares them to their nonprofit-managed counterparts. To do this, the research uses a descriptive, comparative case study design which examines how three cities, Portland OR; San Francisco, CA; and Santa Fe, NM are working to expand community garden access through investment and stewardship of parkland-based community gardens. It uses qualitative data from semi-structured interviews with three public administrators and three executive directors of nonprofit organizations engaged in community garden management, site visits and archival and online documents related to community gardens. The findings show that municipal governments have the capacity to overcome the limitations faced by nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) in providing access to the benefits of community gardens by establishing and supporting these gardens on their parklands. The research considers the case studies through the lens of dominant themes and compares how the municipal models compare to NGO models in serving Latin American immigrants. These findings can serve to inform local governments who wish to expand their residents' access to the benefits of community garden participation.
