For my capstone, I worked on the Garden For All project. We partnered with the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia in Athens to make their community garden more accessible and sustainable. Through my contributions to this project, I gained a great deal of experience integrating sustainability into community efforts, writing accessible guides for sustainability, and working with a team to develop concrete plans for change. We worked hard to integrate sustainability and its emphasis on people, planet, and profit into our garden design, distribution pamphlet, and cost/benefit analysis. Our goal was to help community gardens, especially the one at the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia, to become more sustainable, accessible, and overall beneficial to their communities.
The deliverables for our project were to develop a garden plan for the food bank, a distribution pamphlet for other community gardens, and a cost/benefit analysis detailing the advantage of sustainability and accessibility efforts in community gardening. With help from Isaac Swier, the horticulture specialist at the food bank, we gained a better understanding of how to incorporate sustainability and accessibility into community gardens. I was in charge of designing and writing the distribution pamphlet. I completed background research and presented the information in an accessible way so that people of any skill and knowledge level could integrate sustainability and accessibility efforts into their gardens. My goal was to provide relevant information all in one place so that those hoping to improve the accessibility and sustainability of their community garden have the opportunity to quickly and easily find the proper resources and instructions to do so.
In our project, we integrated the social sphere of sustainability by focusing on accessibility. We wanted to ensure that every community member, regardless of ability, has the opportunity to benefit from community gardens. In order to help other community gardens become more accessible, I focused on integrating a variety of garden redesign options into the distribution pamphlet’s recommendations. For example, one simple and affordable way to make any community garden more accessible is to add signage that is in multiple languages and includes pictures. This ensures that those who speak different languages are not excluded and that individuals who struggle with reading can still understand and learn from the signs. Ensuring that each member of a community can utilize a garden space allows for a greater sense of community and opportunities for sustainability practices to become commonplace. Additionally, creating a space for people to be included in a community activity has the potential to inspire a love of the environment, providing the possibility for more people to work towards a healthier and more inclusive planet.
Our project also focused on the environmental sphere of sustainability. We sought to create deliverables that can help others to work towards improving the health of the planet. I designed the pamphlet to be an easy guide for everyone, even beginners, to develop community gardens that not only do not cause more harm to the planet, but can also help mitigate environmental damage. For example, using recycled or repurposed materials to build community garden structures prevents waste and has very little cost. Building a community garden that actively works towards bettering the environment and teaching others how to become more sustainable will have lasting impacts on community members. They will have the opportunity to take what they have learned from engaging with their community garden and use it in their daily lives and careers.
We also integrated economic sustainability into our garden design, distribution pamphlet, and cost/benefit analysis. We wanted to demonstrate to those unfamiliar with sustainability that environmental and social health can correlate with profit. There is a general misunderstanding that sustainability efforts and practices prevent organizations from being profitable. However, as we sought to illustrate, integrating sustainability practices and sustainable materials into a community garden can significantly reduce spending and has the potential to save those gardens money in the long-run. For example, adding a cistern to a community garden can reduce spending on water. Although it may have a significant cost up-front, over time, it has the potential to curtail a community garden’s water bill. Our hope is that our inclusion of a cost/benefit analysis will demonstrate that profit and sustainability are not mutually exclusive.
Together, we did our best to ensure that the Food Bank of Northeast Georgia’s community garden, and other community gardens across the nation, have the opportunity to become more sustainable and accessible. By keeping the three spheres of sustainability, social, economic, and environmental, forefront in our minds, we developed a garden design, distribution pamphlet, and cost/benefit analysis that has the potential to influence many community gardens to become more sustainable and accessible. I believe that my work on the Garden For All project has contributed to providing people with the opportunity to better themselves, their communities, and their planet.