Food-Related Programming in Public Gardens A Report By

Benveniste Consulting June 2016

1 Table of Contents

1. Introduction ...... 4

2. Thanks and Acknowledgements ...... 5

3. Executive Summary ...... 6

4. Methods ...... 8

Survey ...... 8

Interviews ...... 8

5. Garden Profiles ...... 10

6. Activities & Programs ...... 13

Gardens Offer a Broad Range of Food-Related Activities ...... 13

Education Programs ...... 15

Offsite Activities & Programs ...... 16

Collaborations ...... 17

Great Food Programs Come in Gardens of All Sizes ...... 20

7. Goals ...... 22

Challenges to Achieving Goals ...... 24

Influence on Institutional Mission and Vision ...... 26

8. Outcomes, Evaluation Methods, and Impacts ...... 28

Outcomes ...... 28

Evaluation Methods ...... 29

Impacts ...... 31

Diversity ...... 32

Fundraising ...... 34

Career Opportunities ...... 35

2 Sustainability ...... 36

Media Coverage ...... 37

9. The Role of the American Public Gardens Association ...... 39

Food Program Support ...... 39

Food Session Ideas for Future Conferences ...... 40

Appendix A –Supplemental Survey Tables ...... 42

Appendix B –Interview Responses ...... 48

Respondents’ Extended Description of Program Activities (Q1 and Q2) ...... 48

Description of food-related program/activity goals (Q3) ...... 54

Challenges to achieving food program goals (Q4) ...... 62

Important food program collaborators (Q5) ...... 69

Future food program collaborators (Q6) ...... 74

Important food program outcomes (Q7) ...... 78

Food program evaluation methods (Q8) ...... 82

Food program impacts on diversity (Q9a) ...... 86

Food program impacts on fundraising goals (Q9b) ...... 90

Food program impacts on sustainability operations (Q9c) ...... 92

Food program impacts on media coverage (Q9d) ...... 94

Influence of food programs on institutional mission/vision (Q10) ...... 95

How the American Public Gardens Association can support food programming at public gardens (Q11) ...... 99

Food session ideas at future conferences/interest in joining section (Q12) ...... 102

Career opportunities linked to food programs (Q13) ...... 105

Future funding (Q14) ...... 106

Appendix C – Qualtrics Report ...... 108

3 1. Introduction

The purpose of this research was to investigate the prevalence and depth of food- related programs currently offered by members of the American Public Gardens Association. This research is comprised of two parts, survey and interviews. The survey was implemented first, as it was designed to generate a basic understanding of the activities, education program focus, impacts and barriers connected with food-related programming offered by public gardens. The survey was sent to all 584 members of the American Public Gardens Association in February 2016, and the analysis of the survey data was submitted in April. Shortly after, interviews were conducted with program administrators or executive directors/CEOs of 16 public gardens of all sizes with active food programs. The purpose of these interviews was to get a richer description of food program activities, goals, program collaborators, program outcomes, methods for evaluating outcomes, impacts, and the role that the American Public Gardens Association could play in supporting these programs. Taken together, the survey data and the interview responses offer a snapshot of how public gardens currently understand and value their food-related programs in the context of institutional mission and operations.

This report integrates the survey and interview findings for use and dissemination by the American Public Gardens Association at its annual conference in Miami, Florida in June 2016. This year’s conference will also mark the inaugural year of a new Food & Agriculture professional section.

The Leichtag Foundation, in collaboration with the American Public Gardens Association, provided guiding interest and financial support for this research, which was conducted by Benveniste Consulting with input from Erin Kinley, a graduate student at the Longwood Garden/University of Delaware graduate program in public horticulture.

4 2. Thanks and Acknowledgements

This report is an outcome – surely not the last – of a long-standing focus by the American Public Gardens Association on food issues and the role of public gardens in the sustainable food systems arena. Public Garden, the Association’s quarterly publication, has devoted multiple issues, in whole or in part, to these topics over its long history. Of special note was the 2010, Volume 25, Number 3 Issue, devoted to “The Food Movement rising” as Michael Pollan’s article expressed it. Celebrity chef profiles (Mario Batali, Lidia Bastianich, Michel Nischan), beautiful edible garden advice (Rosalind Creasy), a reflection on how local food was (and is) integral to the mission of the Cleveland Botanical Garden (Natalie Ronayne) and thoughtful reflections on how food gardening and climate change concerns are fundamentally connected (Anna Lappe) – all were beautifully captured in that issue.

In 2010 – yes, same year -- Richard Piacentini of the Phipps Conservatory and Botanical Gardens had pulled together a dozen other public gardens at the annual conference to form the American Public Gardens Association Healthy Food Garden Task Force. That initiative developed a formal action agenda that was followed by a nationally attended conference, “Feeding the Spirit,” that Phipps hosted in Pittsburgh in fall 2011. The Obama White House Let’s Move/Let’s Grow initiative was a part of that inspiration.

In the past year, there has been a re-grouping of gardens and people committed to food and agriculture programming at public gardens. The goal is to advance the ways in which public gardens grow, educate, model, train, employ, and innovate, using food as a means and as an end. It turns out that food-related programming has taken off in directions that few even predicted back in 2010, with a full harvest of ideas and programs that can be shared and refined.

This report is indebted to the 104 gardens that responded to the survey, and to the sixteen garden administrators and program staff who took the time to be interviewed about their food-related programs, current and aspirational. Many thanks to those people and institutions. We know there are many more like them out there.

5 3. Executive Summary

• Food programs are increasingly part of public garden identity. Eighty- three out of 104 public gardens that responded to the survey (80%) offer food-related programming regardless of their budget size. The prevalence of food programs is not a recent phenomenon; 69% of public gardens with food programs have offered them for at least 6 years, 20% of gardens have offered them for 21 or more years. Survey analysis suggests growth potential for food programs, and interviews reflect how gardens recognize the social, educational, economic, and sustainability rewards associated with food systems programs and activities.

• Gardens offer a wide range of food-related activities both at their main garden sites and offsite locations. The most popular activities are garden displays, classes and lectures. Display areas often serve as spaces to integrate general food and agricultural education with additional program activities and goals. Many off-site activities lead to or involve collaborations with other organizations. Public gardens of all sizes identified a wide variety of food program collaborators and are engaged in active crop research, both domestic and international.

• Gardens with food programs serve multiple goals simultaneously and generate education and health benefits for a broad range of visitors and participants while also supporting the garden’s mission. Most gardens interviewed noted that their food garden displays and programs were comfortable and familiar points of entry for less traditional garden visitors, and that offsite programs afford important community connections.

• Teaching people how to grow and prepare fresh fruits and vegetables, and increasing access to healthy foods and job skills training are important outcomes of food programs at public gardens. In addition, food programs have positive financial outcomes.

• Food-related programs positively impact the diversity of garden audiences, fundraising goals, sustainability operations, and media coverage, and they have a strong effect on expanding relationships with outside organizations.

• Many gardens observe that their food education and outreach programs positively impact participants’ quality of life. However, the anecdotal nature

6 of these observations makes them difficult to quantify and track over time and pose an inherent evaluation challenge to measuring program impact.

• Gardens would like the American Public Gardens Association to provide a forum for sharing food and agriculture program best practices, affordable and effective evaluation strategies, problem-solving approaches, and curricular resources. The majority of gardens use food or agriculture related curricula in their education programs, and 75% of them are willing to share their curricula with the American Public Gardens Association.

7 4. Methods

Survey The survey was designed by Benveniste Consulting using the software Qualtrics, and in collaboration with Erin Kinley, a Longwood Gardens/University of Delaware graduate student. The survey included 45 questions that covered food program activity, food program education curriculum, food program impacts, and barriers to offering and expanding food programs. The survey was administered by the American Public Gardens Association and sent as a link embedded in an introductory email to all 584 public garden members. After two weeks, a total of 104 member gardens had responded to the survey, providing a response rate of 17.8%1. Because the response rate did not meet the 20-25% criteria, certain statistical analysis was not possible.

Two questions in the survey were eliminated from analysis due to technical errors. Those questions were Question #39, a multiple-choice question on program goals, and Question #44, a multiple-choice question on identifying types of organizations with which gardens partner. Data on program goals was collected, however, through a question asking gardens to self-describe food program goals. Data on partnering organizations was captured in the follow-up interviews.

Interviews Interviews were conducted with 16 public gardens of all annual budget sizes (see Table 4-1: Gardens Interviewed by Budget ). Fifteen of the gardens interviewed had established food programs, while one garden was completing the design of a large food garden exhibit and related program that will be open to the public in 2017. Several criteria were considered in the selection of interviewed gardens, including: gardens that offered a high number of food programming activities; gardens that offered a range of food programming budgets; gardens that offered a range of annual budget sizes; gardens that reflected a range of geographic locations; and gardens that

1 In fact, 106 gardens responded to the survey; however, one garden only provided its name without completing the survey and another garden started the survey twice. The duplicate and incomplete responses were eliminated from the analysis and excluded from the response rate calculation.

8 were willing to be interviewed. Interviews lasted between 30 and 45 minutes and were recorded, with permission, for accuracy.

Table 4-1: Gardens Interviewed by Budget Classification* (data from 2015 Public Gardens Benchmarking Study)**

Annual budgets greater than $10M

Chicago Botanic Garden New York Botanical Gardens Denver Botanic Gardens Missouri Botanical Garden United States Botanic Garden Dallas Arboretum and Botanical Garden Annual budgets between $3-10M Minnesota Landscape Arboretum Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden Naples Botanical Garden Annual budgets less than $3M Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden Queens Botanical Garden Toledo Botanical Garden UBC Botanical Garden The Gardens on Spring Creek College of the Atlantic Gardens

*Annual budget size classifications are those used by the American Public Gardens Association. **Annual budget data provided by the 2015. Gardens Survey. Public Gardens Benchmarking Study. American Public Gardens Association, September 2015 (Based on data collected for fiscal year 2014).

9 5. Garden Profiles Figure 5-1: Annual Budgets1 for Gardens of all sizes responded to the Respondent Gardens with Food Programs survey, from gardens with annual and Without budgets of over $10M to gardens with budgets of less than $150,000 (see Figure 5-1). With the exception of gardens with budgets in the range of $3-$10M, there was at least one garden without a food program in every budget category. Figure 5-2 shows the number of respondent gardens by annual budget size and for comparison, Figure 5-3 shows the number of American Public Gardens Association member gardens by annual budget size. The largest gardens – those with annual budgets over $10M – had the highest response rates (see Table 5-1).

Figure 5-2: Number of Figure 5-3: Number of American Public Gardens Respondent Gardens by Annual Association Member Gardens Budget Size by Annual Budget Size

12 > $10M 9 35 20 10 84 $3.001M - $10M 216 $1.001M - $3M 16 20 $401K - $1M 122 $151 - $400K 25 121

Source: Annual Budget Data provided by the 2015. Gardens Survey. Public Gardens Benchmarking Study. American Public Gardens Association, September 2015 (Based on data collected for fiscal year 2014)

10 Limited staff and limited financial resources Table 5-1: Survey Response Rate are the top two barriers for the 13 gardens by Annual Budget Size (12%) that are interested in offering food- Annual Budget Survey Response Rate related programming but have not yet done Size by Budget Size so (see Table A-1). For these gardens, > $10M 75% attracting new audiences and fulfilling an area $3.001M - 10M 29% of the garden’s mission would be the most $1.01M - $3M 24% likely reasons for offering these programs in $401K - $1M 20% the future (see Table A-3). $151 - $400K 13%

expressed no interest in offering food-related programming (see Table A-5). For the 4% of gardens that had food programming in the past but no longer, limited staff resources was the most compelling reason (see Table A-6). In another case, the garden was located very near to a dedicated food production/education organization, so such programming at the garden was perceived as duplicative.

Relative to their annual budgets, food program budgets tend to be small. On average, gardens reported spending less than 3% of their annual budgets on food programs. Figure 5-4: Food Programming Approximately 40% of respondent gardens Budgets for Respondent Gardens with food programming budgets had budgets of less than $2,000, while only 14% had food programming budgets of at least $75,000 (see Figure 5-4). With the exception of gardens with food program budgets of at least $75,000, average staff sizes for food programs are small (see Figure 5-5). In Figure 5-5, note that two of the gardens with annual budgets greater than $10M reported a high number of seasonal staff employed in their food programs, which substantially raised the average for gardens with food program budgets of $75,000 or more. The

11 median staff size for gardens with budgets of $75,000 or more is 9 employees.

Gardens with higher food program budgets tended to hire more full-time staff; however, the weaker correlation with seasonal staff suggests that food budget size is less of a factor in seasonal staff hires.

Figure 5-5: Average Staff Size for Food Programs by Program Budget

12 6. Activities & Programs

There appears to be wide recognition of the social, educational, economic, and environmental sustainability rewards associated with food systems programs and activities at public gardens, from very small to very large. The overwhelming majority of public gardens (83 total, and 80% surveyed) offer food-related programming, and a further 12% say they hope to offer such programs in the future (see Table 6-2).

While increasing in awareness and popularity, food-related programming at public gardens is not a recent phenomenon. Seventy percent of gardens that offer food program activities have been offering those activities for more than six years, and of these 38% have offered activities for at least 11 years (see Table 6-1).

Gardens Offer a Broad Range of Food-Related Activities Follow up interviews revealed that gardens were offering a broad range of Table 6-2: Number of Gardens that Do food programming activities both at and Do Not Offer Food-Related Activities their main garden sites and offsite (Question #2) locations. Onsite, 83% of gardens Offer Food-Related # of % surveyed provide displays of food Activities? Gardens plants, sometimes in multiple display Yes 83 80% areas. This was the most prevalent food In the past, but not 4 4% activity among survey respondents (see currently Figure 6-1). These garden display areas Not currently, but maybe 13 12% often serve as spaces to integrate in the future additional program activities and goals, No, and no plans to do so 4 4% which range from general visitor Total 104 100% exhibits (49% of gardens) to pre-k to adult education classes (71% of gardens), and from horticultural therapy Table 6-1: Years Gardens have Offered programs to culinary arts training Food Program Activities (Question #27) programs (47% of gardens). One Years # of Gardens % garden administrator described their Less than 5 years 25 30% “veterans-to-farmers programs” as a 6-10 years 26 32% way for veterans “to be employed, and 11-20 years 15 18% also [as] an outlet for some of their 21+ years 17 20% PTSD issues.” Veterans are given a Total 83 100% stipend to work at the garden’s farm

13 where, as one interviewee said: “we incorporate Figure 6-1: Food-Related Activities Offered by horticultural therapy as part of Gardens their program. And then we (Question #8) hire a couple of them to actually run the farmers’ markets in the food deserts.”

Many gardens, especially those in or near urban areas, sponsor training programs to help low income or disadvantaged youth. One garden targeted urban youth through the sweet potato. The interviewee described it as: “kind of a business program that teaches entrepreneurial skills and soft job skills… But again, the sweet potatoes are Table 6-3: Tabulated Short Answer “Other” the basis. So they learn to Responses to Activities Offered by Gardens’ Food grow sweet potatoes, then Programs (Question #8) make products like sweet # of Self-described “Other” activities potato cookies, and sell them Gardens and market them in a facility 7 Have community gardens operated and run and 4 Practice charitable food distribution promoted by local youth.” 4 Sell harvested food at markets, and two of those gardens explicitly stated selling at markets in Nearly half of the surveyed food deserts gardens had food-related 7 Offer community outreach and education exhibits. These dedicated activities that include the following: job training, summer camp education, university education, exhibits show how food plants veteran job training and rehabilitation, and can provide a variety of teaching gardens at urban housing ecosystem services, including developments. pollinator resources and water 3 Produce food for processing, sale, and onsite consumption catchment, as well as provide specialty crop opportunities that are particularly suited to regional weather and climate conditions. Several of the interviewed gardens mentioned their efforts to promote the importance of pollinators in food systems. One

14 garden administrator spoke of their planned pollination facility that will “anchor the site, the main message there is we’re looking at the food system, but for a model garden. When someone arrives on the site, they’ll not only experience the food system – a multi-scale food system and the production – but they’ll also explore the role of pollinators within that food system. Because of it being a pollination center at its core.”

Education Programs Table 6-4: Aspects of Food Systems Gardens frequently include the production Included in Garden Food Programs and consumption aspects of food systems (Question #28) in their food programs, while over half of gardens with food programs included Food system aspects # of Gardens % environmental impacts as a program Production 79 95% aspect (see Table 6-4). One quarter of Consumption 57 69% gardens with food programs include food Environmental impacts 47 57% policies as a program aspect. Processing 34 41% Distribution 28 34% Of the 79 gardens to include production- Food policies 21 25% related subjects in their food program activities, ‘Home food gardening’ and ‘Soil health and fertility’ are by far the most Table 6-5: Production-Related popular. In addition, over half of these Activities that Gardens’ Food gardens include organic agriculture and Programs Address (Question #29) Integrated Pest Management (IPM). Approximately one third of these gardens Production-related activities # of % Gardens include ‘Permaculture’ and Home food gardening 74 94% ‘Agrobiodiversity’ as production subjects Soil health and fertility 59 75% in their food program activities (see Table Organic agriculture 58 73% 6-5 below). Integrated Pest 52 66% Management (IPM) Almost half of the responding gardens Permaculture 27 34% identified ‘organic vs. non-organic Agrobiodiversity 23 29% production’ as a challenge or topic that Conventional farming 14 18% their food system programs address (see Hydroponics 8 10% Table 6-7). Other (please specify) 8 10% Aquaponics 7 9% *% of the 79 gardens that responded to this question.

15 Table 6-6: Gardens Using Food or Table 6-7: Challenges and Topics that Agriculture Related Curriculum in their Gardens’ Food System Programs Education Programs (Question #31) Address (Question #30)

Using Curriculum? # of Gardens % Challenges & Topics # of % Yes 70 85% Addressed Gardens No 12 15% Organic vs. non-organic 41 49% production Total 82 100% Food systems' impact on the 38 46% environment Food security 38 46% The majority of gardens use food or Agrobiodiversity 25 30% agriculture related curricula in their Feeding a growing 22 27% education programs (see Table 6-6), and population 75% of those gardens (51 in all) are Our food systems education 18 22% does not include these topics willing to share their curricula with the Biotechnology 9 11% American Public Gardens Association. Other (please specify) 4 5% *% of the 83 gardens that responded to this Offsite Activities & Programs Though the majority of food program activities Figure 6-2: Location of Food Program Activities Offered take place at the garden, by Gardens (Questions # 10, 12, 14, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24, a number of gardens 26). offer these activities at offsite locations. Over 25% of food crop collections and seed banks, “Other” programs (see Figure 6-2 and Table 6-3), training programs and crop research takes place at off-site locations (see Figure 6-2). Fully half of the gardens interviewed have offsite operation facilities and/or programs that integrate food and agriculture activities with community gardening and revitalization, children’s education, youth leadership, job skills training, and social entrepreneurship.

16 Collaborations Many of these off-site activities lead to or involve collaborations with other organizations. Public gardens of all sizes identified a broad range of important food program collaborators. Most interviewed gardens identified strong working relationships with their local farmers’ market organizations, local chefs, and those local restaurants – including garden food service -- that source produce from the public garden itself or from supported community gardens. Prek-12 school systems are natural program users and collaborators. In addition, gardens of all sizes identified community colleges and universities as important education collaborators when it comes to culinary and horticulture training, master gardener programs through Extension services, and research partners. One garden characterized their extensive relationships with the local educational institutions, saying:

We have a very strong relationship with the (local) public schools. . . We have a great relationship with the (local) University Extension. They are actually housed on our main campus here and we work closely on programming and many other things. For example, we have an Urban Master Farmer program that we just initiated last fall in collaboration with them. Public gardens with extensive outreach programs identified a greater number of collaborations with local governmental agencies. These agencies include, but are not limited to, land banks, public housing authorities, health and human service departments, juvenile court system, and the USDA WIC program. One garden administrator described how they worked with the local housing authority on a new development that had “open space, and with us they created a number of raised bed gardens. And so that’s when we created our curriculum for the urban food initiative. And we taught residents how to grow food at that site, and that was really the big opportunity to get this thing off the ground.”

Another garden worked with the city to “re-purpose vacant lots as community gardens” but also “with local neighborhood businesses and grocery stores to make sure that there is fresh fruit and vegetables” in order to foster a “more holistic conversation with our city partners, and saying how can we as a botanical garden help you and the residents of these neighborhoods value fresh, local, sustainable food…and increase their capacity and interest in growing their own food.” Working with the city to convert vacant lots to community gardens was a common theme. One garden emphasized the importance of their collaboration with the local city government, saying:

17 We have a great relationship with the city, and one of their strategic priorities under their community development block grant is eliminating blight and (doing) community gardening. And we are really the resource for that. Not only are they a partial funder, but we have a very good relationship with them in terms of advocating for change in regulations around gardening and growing food in the city. Health organizations and hospitals were also identified as collaborators for nutrition education, meal planning and related community-based outreach. Gardens with operating budgets less than $10M with extensive outreach programming identified community gardening associations and local youth organizations as important collaborators.

Gardens that have dedicated job and skill training programs for youth, adults with barriers to employment (including recent combat veterans), and those with mental illness or other disabilities, have collaborations with a variety of organizations aligned to those audience sectors. These include veteran-serving agencies, mental health clinics, low and mixed-income housing developers, organizations serving people with autism, and the local criminal justice system. For gardens that have a national or international agriculture education or crop research agenda, collaborators can include agricultural societies, national education organizations like the National Center for Appropriate Technology (NCAT), and USDA, USAID, and international crop research and relief organizations.

Most gardens were interested in expanding and extending their collaborations. Gardens with annual budgets less than $10M identified a broader, less specific range of possible future collaborators than gardens with annual budgets greater than $10M. Health and wellness organizations, the business community, the culinary/chef community, and schools were the most frequently identified future food program collaborators of gardens with annual budgets less than $10M. One garden was particularly interested in “an opportunity to elevate the whole enterprise of gardening, in particular around food, for communities and neighborhoods that have precious little ability to generate revenue other ways.” They described the project:

So, we’re creating a food hub and engaging with specific, more entrepreneurial type of community gardens, so they’re going to devote a small portion of their gardens for commercial enterprise, if you will. They’re going to grow and we’re going to buy it and resell it. You know, it’s very challenging to engage with the Saturday farmers market as a small, tiny grower. So we are going to provide that conduit to get these vegetables to market. Gardens with annual budgets greater than $10M identified fewer, but more specific future collaborators, including: immigrant and refugee organizations, nearby cultural

18 institutions exhibiting on similar subjects, locally active agribusinesses, and after- school program partners. This specificity suggests that gardens with annual budgets greater than $10M are targeting audiences based on their previous collaborations and experience. One garden administrator described how “As part of a new cooking demonstration facility project, we’re going to garden year round and will be creating new programs.” As a part of the project they “want to increase our after school partners…there’s an after school program organization that works with several schools already, so we’ve started to develop relationships with those sort of organizations…”

Gardens that are engaged in crop research, have a commitment to regional or national agriculture education, or that are pro-active regarding food access and social justice issues, are challenged to think increasingly in business terms: what kinds of collaborations -- traditional or non-traditional (e.g., with agribusiness)– can offer pathways to audience education and service goals? Who can help effectively brand a garden’s produce stream and work with production training programs that have paying customers and willing employers of graduates? What national organizations (e.g., National Center for Appropriate Technology) can inform and endorse garden- produced curricula that have a national audience? What are the regional, national and international crop research organizations with which garden programs need to forge closer ties?

The ways that public gardens collaborate with private and public sector organizations is primarily a function of the garden’s vision and mission. In the context of a changing climate and the necessarily changing practices for all kinds of horticulture, public gardens are acting as informed and trusted leaders in the national food system debate and as agents of experimentation and change. As a garden administrator said about those who visit their garden:

They’re not going to see a ginormous crop field like they are at the science center, but they’ll see other approaches to small scale food gardening, other exhibits and other questions and talks about things like perennial polyculture and the future of food, and all those things we’re able to offer up… I think that’s a great opportunity for collaboration in the future. So instead of saying, ‘oh, gosh, let them do that [go to the local science center that has food exhibits], they’re on their own.’ I don’t think so, I think it’s better if we can say ‘okay, how can we make this topic even more compelling [in partnership with the science center]?’ so that more people are drawn to it and more people are asking these critical questions about the source of our food and our consumer choices, about what we buy at the grocery store and what we grow ourselves.

19 Great Food Programs Come in Gardens of All Sizes Impressively, garden outreach activities do not seem to be a function of size, but rather determined by a garden’s understanding of its mission and the availability of community partners, particularly community gardening and human service organizations and local governmental agencies. While there was a strong correlation in the survey data between the number of food-related activities offered and a garden’s food programing budget, the correlation with any single program was much weaker (see Figure 6-3). This suggests that gardens with smaller budgets are still able to implement targeted food programing that fits with their mission and available partners. Of the activities surveyed, training programs and research are most strongly associated with large food-related program budgets. These activities typically have more specialized staff requirements, so it is not surprising that they are more likely to be found in gardens with budgets large enough to hire the required staff. Exhibits, classes, garden displays, and lectures are more likely to be offered by gardens irrespective of their food-related program budget size.

Supporting Locally Grown Figure 6-3: Correlation of Food-Related Food Activities with Food-Related Program Budget “…we’ll be increasing the number of CSAs, and we also sell to many restaurants already – I think we’re up to eight restaurants that we sell to. So we’re hoping to increase that as time goes on. And then there’s the whole branding thing that goes with it, and so we’ll get these restaurants to agree to put a little mark next to the dishes that contain locally grown produce that says “[local] Grown” [on the menu]. And this is reinforcing the whole carbon footprint message. If every

family spent x number of dollars on locally grown food, the impact to our local economy would be dramatic.”

–A Garden Administrator

20 While the correlation trend for the various activities is similar, the number of staff employed for food-related programs has a weaker association than food program budgets (see Figure 6-4). This suggests that food program budgets are a greater barrier to gardens offering food program activities than the size of their food program staff. However, neither smaller budgets nor small staff sizes prohibit gardens from implementing food programing. In fact, many gardens with operating budgets less than $3M are doing very interesting and innovative work in the area of food programing. One such garden has training programs focused Figure 6-4: Correlation of Food-Related on re-integrating young men Activities with Food-Related Program Staff Size released from juvenile detention. The former detainees spend “several months” where they “teach them on a platform of community gardening, facilities management” and other “soft skills like teambuilding, how to incorporate constructive criticism, how to show up on time, how to speak to somebody clearly, how to look someone in the eye and shake their hand. . . at the same time, we’re teaching landscaping, how to garden, how to grow food, how to raise chickens, how to harvest honey.”

21 7. Goals

Using food to reconnect people with plants and the land, general food gardening know-how, and nutrition education are the most widely reported program goals of all gardens surveyed and interviewed. In the words of one garden administrator:

…using food as a connector to engage people in the community, Figure 7-1: Self-Identified Goals for Food Programs to connect plants in a way (Question #34) that they do daily, by eating, but that they might not always consider. We get a lot of kids who didn’t know that potatoes grew in the ground, or where French fries come from, or even … about the relation of honeybees to the food system, and pollination, and how that gets their fruits, and those relationships. In the interviews, every garden with offsite locations highlighted their outreach and community engagement goals, with a focus on improving quality of life, increasing food access, and teaching transferrable skills that support at-risk youth, strengthen employability, and help empower underserved communities. One garden administrator described how their culinary arts program serves future employability:

With the culinary arts students – it’s to enhance their potential for employment. Our goal …is for these students to understand where food comes from, understand how to produce the food, understand how to grow the food, understand what quality food looks like, and how to utilize … tropical fruits, vegetables, food and spices.

22 For a garden with a budget over $10M and a substantial job training program, the goal is much more explicit: “our goal is definitely looking at job placement rates for both our [veteran] population and our certificate program, both have really high success rates for placement.”

Several gardens with annual budgets less than $3M described educating about water conservation and sustainable production practices as part of their program goals, which are linked to local or regional climate challenges. As one garden administrator described it, “[Blank] Farm is a direct response to what’s going on right now in [state], it’s a direct response to the drought. One of our mottos is, ‘our crop is harvesting water,’ that’s what we’re harvesting.”

Gardens of all sizes described how food programs serve multiple goals simultaneously and generate education and health benefits for a broad range of visitors and participants while also supporting the garden’s mission. Survey responses offered some additions and refinements to the major program goals categories noted above, including such objectives as building self-sufficiency, green economy awareness, teaching about the role of pollinators, and health and well-being connections, see Figure 7-1.

Strong Social Responsibility Mission Supporting Community Needs “Food... connect[s] people to plants in through Gardening Education one of the most fundamental The goals are pretty self-evident….to relationships we have in communities teach people how to grow food. If our where there may not be a desire or a whole mission is nurturing the joy of connection in coming to the [garden] growing, it matters not to us whether space. So it’s a matter of us going out you’re growing flowers or food, you’re and interacting with them in their own growing… so in this case, we’re communities … it lives out our diversity teaching people how to grow food. And core value, it lives out our sustainability one of the goals, obviously… is to core value, and our relevance core value, increase access to fresh produce in and even our transformation core value. areas of the city that don’t have easy We really feel a sense of responsibility to access to fresh produce. So, in the end, tackle issues where we have something decreasing hunger, essentially….we to offer, where we can really make a have several food deserts, so this is a difference and improve the lot of society way to empower people; not just give a overall.” man a fish, but teach a man to fish.

–A Garden Administrator –A Garden Administrator

23 Challenges to Achieving Goals Though challenges to achieving food program goals are diverse, several Figure 7-2: Ranked Importance of themes emerged. Not surprisingly, Resources to Achieve Goals (Question survey results showed that gardens #35) with annual budgets less than $3M and municipally supported gardens identify limited financial and staff resources as the biggest barriers to achieving program goals, see Figure 7-2. As one garden administrator put it: “we don’t have the staff, we don’t have the money for all that we want to do. We don’t have enough time… just the usuals.” Survey respondents also cited the importance of partnerships and collaborations and appropriate marketing, or lack thereof (see Table A- 12). In the interviews, one garden administrator described this in terms of identifying reliable community partnerships:

I think the only real challenge we have is identifying reliable partnerships that are gonna fit for more than just one season…and unless you really have a partner there who can help communicate with the broader community that ‘this is available and this is happening,’ there’s only so much marketing we can do. Interviewed gardens of all sizes identified food prep as a challenge, including food safety concerns, the increased need for commercial kitchens at their sites, and managing safe culinary demonstrations for visitors. One garden administrator summed up their cooking demo complications:

Staffing is necessary, and of course you have to maintain a facility that is clean and sanitary, and then also just managing expectations of what the demonstration offers. And we include sampling, which is not to be misunderstood as a meal. And then finding that sweet spot of enough information, but not too much information to hold the attention of several generations together.

Gardens with extensive outreach programs also cited logistics associated with program delivery, overcoming language/cultural barriers when working with immigrant groups, and communicating that offsite programs are part of an institutional identity.

24 One garden administrator described how navigating these outreach logistics are part and parcel of program goals:

We really have to partner with a number of local social service agencies in order to identify appropriate families who would benefit from this program, and follow up with them and make sure they can get here – again, that’s that logistical challenge – and provide the education programming at a time that’s convenient. They usually bring their children with them, so we do separate programming with the whole family, and then bring them together to do tastings, and eat the rainbow – that kind of thing. And you want to involve as much of the family as possible.

Targeted Programming “The biggest challenges to all of the work is…very carefully, framing the invitation to invite people in, to participate… And that means figuring out through a good audience analysis and really listening very carefully to intended audiences…so that we can design programs that are, number one, of interest, and relatable, and number two, meeting people where they are. Whether that’s geographically or in their learning. And those are the challenges that cut across all of this, it’s the key, and probably the hardest work that I do, at that level. It takes a long time to get it, and it never stops, it’s constant, and I do it almost daily in one way or another, across all programs.”

–A Garden Administrator

Interview gardens reported on how food topics (e.g., environmental implications of a meat-heavy diet) can be politically charged and noted the general agricultural illiteracy The Challenge of Funding Support of most audiences. When Outcomes Are Difficult to As noted above, gardens talked about the Measure ongoing challenge of matching program “And I tell people, you know, we’re content to audience need and capacity, and not building widgets here. We’re not finding the “sweet spot”. This becomes setting up an assembly line so that you can fund an assembly line and then especially important for gardens that offer you just walk away and say “look at all outreach services for which there is no the widgets we’re producing.” This is a earned income success metric. Targeting human driven activity, and it’s not for also becomes important in public garden sissies, and it takes ongoing education communities where similar or even and encouragement on the part of competing services are available. What people who know what they’re doing makes a particular garden program unique to the people who don’t.” and valuable compared to others? When –A Garden Administrator

25 The Challenge of Competing for Attention “As a botanical garden, which is like a cultural destination and a place for people to come, it’s what’s the best added-value we can bring to that mix, where we’re not necessarily duplicating but having a cumulative effect, having an additive effect. I’m offering that up as a challenge, because there’s this constantly evolving sort of thing… There’s just so much happening and so many things going on that it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the shuffle and really resonate with people.”

–A Garden Administrator

should you refer a would-be program participant to another organization? How do you manage board and funder expectations regarding “quantifiable outcomes” for programs that serve hard-to-track-and-measure participants? There can be Board buy- in challenges associated with such programs.

Influence on Institutional Mission and Vision Mission of Plant Interviewed gardens of all sizes described how their Conservation through food programs either fit within their institutional mission Sustainable Agriculture or are currently expanding the definition of that mission “it all comes down to in very explicit ways. The mission statements of all sustainable livelihood. gardens have to do with fostering human-environmental And sustainable relationships, whether that be through the power of livelihoods, by definition, plants to heal, plant conservation and its relationship to often comes [down] to sustainable livelihoods, improving the lives of people agriculture and food. In through plants, or simply supporting environmental that sense, the topic of stewardship. As one garden administrator framed it: sustainable agriculture and sustainable food part of our mission is designing more innovative systems, and practices programs that support environmental stewardship. And and cultural traditions and having the farm is an amazing demonstration of values related to a more environmental stewardship. It’s not just about the food sustainable use of food produced from it, but also the whole cycle. And it and what we eat, is became really intentional to have this farm as a place to absolutely part and parcel bring people to show them where their food is coming of achieving the mission from and making a connection to their lives... Food has a of plant conservation.” totally different impact when people see it growing, and they go home and cook that food and really can connect –A Garden Administrator the dots with where it came from.

26 Two gardens described their mission as being many things to many people and one garden described how its food programs have helped shape a new vision for the garden. Several gardens described how their food programming is more relatable and familiar to their visitors than other exhibits; and several other gardens described how food program activities – both onsite and at outreach locations – have expanded the garden’s understanding of its mission and values and have earned board support. As one garden administrator described it:

The garden’s mission is around the power of plants…and I think we’re broadening the definition of the power of plants, and we’ve seen what plants can do for individuals dealing with things like PTSD and homelessness and other challenges that they have in life…we have a number of board members who are slowly coming around on that. It was a little bit of a push initially, but I think they see the value of it now.

Mission to be Many Things to Many People “our mission is to be many things to many people because we are a city facility, we have a very diverse community, and I think that our farm does address something. I think some people may not be as comfortable with many of the formal aspects of our botanic garden, but they like the farm; they almost relax – like “I know the farm, I like the farm.” It’s something familiar to many people. ”

–A Garden Administrator

27 8. Outcomes, Evaluation Methods, and Impacts

Food-related programs positively impact garden diversity, fundraising goals, sustainability operations, media coverage, and expansion of relationships with outside organizations.

Outcomes Nutrition Education That Reduces Food-related programming at public gardens Inequality generates multiple positive outcomes for “[Our Community] is a really visitors, program participants, and institutions interesting community, and one of alike. Interviewed gardens of all sizes the most affluent communities in the identified learning how to grow food, world. The flipside is all those increased food production, improved access people who support mowing those to healthy foods, and improved health – lawns and cleaning those houses quality of life – as important outcomes of their …And I think that in the lower food programs. In addition, food programs [income] communities, you have have positive financial outcomes. As one essentially almost no knowledge of garden administrator noted: food, [living in] food deserts, and very poor eating habits. So I think …this [new food exhibit] garden…will drive this emphasis with children, and attendance in having people want to come those with special needs, [to] more often. …and I think it’s going to be a understand what foods are available great private rental space, because a lot of and how delicious [they] can be, I our revenue does come from after-hours think that’s going to make a activities and private rentals profound impact on their lives. This Several gardens identified improved place is going to be hard to believe, but attachment, or stronger ties to the garden’s we had a kid, a 10-year-old boy, two years ago in summer camp who had landscape and plants as important outcomes. never had an apple. And my other As one garden administrator noted: “We had favorite, last year I ask some girl as I a lot of people [come out], even in freezing was walking by, I asked her what weather, and they just like the farm. I can’t say was your favorite thing about camp if there’s anything higher level than that, but and the girl said ‘okra’.” we want them to connect to the land, –A Garden Administrator conserve the land, so we’re working on that, not just the food part of this.” Similarly, two gardens noted the transformation of vacant

28 urban lots into multi-functional green spaces as important, as well as the increased media exposure that these activities generate and its positive impact on the collaborator’s public profile:

The outcomes are different for each of our partners. For example, the developer appreciates that space that was once underutilized is now active and engaging residents coming from a mixed housing development. Those are outcomes that he is most interested in…And I think some of the other outcomes that our collaborators are hoping for is in exposure, like at [Name] Place rooftops, I think one of the things the food service provider likes is not necessarily the amount of produce that’s coming off the roofs but the amount of exposure they’re getting, which helps them to book shows at their convention space, and it’s a focus for some of their sustainable operations at [Name] Place Several gardens acknowledged that quantifying the impact of food education and outreach programs is inherently difficult. How do you really know that you have changed an individual or family’s appreciation for healthy fresh food, or their future behaviors, because of their participation in your programs? The only way to know this is to track participants over time, and that is virtually impossible for financial and other reasons. Gardens that operate formally structured youth and adult-training programs can much more easily assess outcomes via completion rates, job placement rates, etc.

Education Impacts on Healthy Food Choice and Gardening Behavior “So we’re finding that children are running home and putting seed packets on their refrigerator instead of their report cards and their pictures from school. That they’re excited, which in turn excites the decision maker in the home, whether that’s mom or whether that’s an aunt or a grandma. They’re [the children] are exciting them that they want to grow … We just see those outcomes, and they’re multifaceted and they go beyond gardening, because the gardens make places safer. And so those opportunities arise so now they can utilize green-space that they couldn’t before because it was a brown-space, or it was a dangerous space. I could go on and on about the benefits of the gardens in the community, but if we’re just talking food, it gives a new meaning to diet, nutrition, health problems and pollution.”

–A Garden Administrator

Evaluation Methods Gardens of all sizes collect survey data from participants in their formal programs, particularly their classes. For those gardens with work training and youth development programs, graduation from the program or training certification is regarded as a solid

29 measure of program success. Several Challenges with Schools: Champion of the gardens interviewed collect pre Teacher Attrition Weakens Momentum and post data for their teacher “It’s interesting working with school programs, and one garden is engaged systems, because teachers move around a in a decades-long longitudinal study of lot. But to us one of the surprises is the their teacher programs. Gardens of all residual culture and impact at the school. sizes with community garden outreach It’s challenging because often, it’s usually a and hunger relief programs keep champion teacher or parent that is driving records on the volume of food it as far as school gardening. And once that produced and donated. Gardens with parent or teacher leaves that school, that water conservation exhibits and momentum leaves that school. So that’s activities record their irrigated water one of the challenges as far as evaluation, use. Major in-house evaluation and seeing the petering out of momentum challenges stem from low participation after we’ve invested in a school and invested in a teacher.” in self-reported surveys, the mobility of teachers who initially champion school –A Garden Administrator garden programs, the difficulty of measuring anecdotal program impacts, and the related challenge of quantifying the benefits of mission The Challenge of Quantifying Anecdotal work. As one garden administrator Data noted: “I can bore you to death with stories of people whose lives have changed as a I came from the for-profit world and I result of being engaged with our programs, understand this model, but this whole and their health has changed. The guy from idea of showing impact is challenging the local housing project who started when you’re doing mission work. It’s gardening with us last summer and had like I said: we’re not making widgets. issues with diabetes, high blood pressure, We can’t show how we sped up the and how that’s changed his life, and how he efficiency of the production line. But, now takes the vegetables to the other we start doing things like weighing people in his housing project, and he’s the food that is harvested from beds teaching them how to cook these things so we have a sense of just how much with low-salt. So, anecdotally there’s food, as we increase the number of dozens and dozens of stories every month, gardens and keeping track of the but it’s hard to quantify that data.” number of feet that are producing produce, and what that does, –A Garden Administrator incrementally, to the availability of

local produce in the market. The struggle to capture information about the impact of education and outreach programs is a long-standing challenge for all museums, including living collection

30 organizations like public gardens. That challenge becomes commensurately bigger and more difficult as the mission of gardens expands to address fundamental quality– of-life issues like food education, nutrition, wellness, community development and work and employment skill training. Good program assessment and evaluation is critically important and in high demand by funders and partners but can also be difficult and expensive.

Measuring Intent to Take Action “The most important thing for program evaluation, the most important question that I ask, and this is going to be for the policy level, for the master gardener program – I’ve come down to only asking one main question, and that is if people have intent to take an action. And I really just zero in on that and sometimes I only send out three or four questions if it’s something big, but did you learn something new, and how do you intend to use that [knowledge] in your work/personal life, whatever is appropriate for the audience.”

–A Garden Administrator

Impacts Food-related programs positively impact Table 8-1: Impact of Food System garden diversity, fundraising goals, Programming on Diversity of Gardens’ sustainability operations, media coverage, Visitors or Program Participants and expansion of relationships with (Question #38) outside organizations. Answer # of Gardens % Eighty-eight percent of gardens offering Increased diversity 42 55% food systems programs indicated that Reduced diversity 0 0% those programs have expanded the No impact 6 8% garden’s relationships with outside Don't know 29 37% organizations, while 6% indicated they Total 77 100% have not (Question #43). Over half the gardens offering Food-Related programs indicated those programs increase garden visitor or program participant diversity (see Table 8-1). Fifty-one percent of gardens offering food system programs indicated these programs were an asset to their garden’s fundraising goals, while 20% indicated they were not (Question #40). Sixty- nine percent of gardens offering food system programs indicated that those programs positively impact the sustainability operations of their garden, while 31% indicated

31 that food programs have no impact on sustainability operations (Question #41). Figure 8-1: Correlation Between # of The majority of gardens offering food Food-Related Activities and Reported Impact system programs (69%) indicated that those programs positively impact the media coverage of their garden, while 31% indicate that food programs have no impact on media coverage (Question #42). Eighty-eight percent of gardens offering food systems programs indicated that those programs have expanded the garden’s relationships with outside organizations, while 6% indicated they have not (Question #43).

Not surprisingly, the number of food- related activities offered by a garden strongly correlates with gardens that identify their food programs as an asset to fundraising goals (see Figure 8-1). This means that gardens with more food- related activities are more likely to say that their food programs benefit their fundraising goals. Unexpectedly, a higher number of food-related activities offered by a garden does not influence whether or not that garden reports increased relationships with outside organizations. This suggests that a garden with only one activity is just as likely to report increased relationships with Offsite Programs Challenge Perceptions and outside organizations as a garden Increase Diversity with many activities “The one challenge that the garden has is the location and perception of serving primarily an Diversity elite audience… having the programs that we have offsite helps us increase our staff diversity. Over half the surveyed gardens Each year we have 200 participants that are in the offering food-related programs program and 90% of the participants are indicated those programs minorities. So it’s important to the program. And increase garden visitor or then 40% of staff are graduates of the program. program participant diversity (see And when serving that constituency, it’s Table 8-1), while interviews important to have a diverse staff.” indicate that diversity impacts –A Garden Administrator become more salient for gardens

32 of any size with offsite food program. Several gardens noted that these offsite programs challenge the perception of the garden as an elite space, that they contribute to increasing the diversity of staff hires, and that they diversify sources of restricted funding. As one garden administrator described it:

We’ve had funding sources come to us to say: ‘I like that you’re in this low-income neighborhood in north [city], and I like what you’re trying to do there as far as building community capacity for healthy, local lifestyles at the community garden. So I’m going to support you with a 2 or 3-year grant.’ So just operating that program and doing that community outreach has brought new sources of funding to the [name] Garden. More generally, food and agriculture exhibits attract a multigenerational audience. As one garden administrator noted, “I’ve got people who are 90-years-old and moms who bring in their 9-day-old babies.” In addition, food programs target participants of all age groups, from pre-k to seniors, from culinary students to recent combat veterans. As one garden administrator described it, the diversity of food programs drive the diversity of its participants:

So whether it’s growing edibles, or how they’re cooked in a more healthful way, or Indian cooking, or vegetarian, or gluten-free, our programming has expanded greatly in the last couple of years. We’re offering some really innovative classes. And I personally feel that diversifies the people who are coming here to learn more about it. Horticultural therapy programs that have a strong food growing dimension are very useful for engaging participants who might not otherwise come to either the garden or an outreach program, including people with a variety of disabilities. Several gardens noted that reduced-fee classes and admission-free days contribute to making the garden and its programs available to a broader public. As one garden administrator

Offsite, Urban Campus Increases Diversity “[the urban campus] has definitely transformed the nature of the people that we reach, just by default, and deliberately by building that facility in the heart of the central city. That really has solidified the opportunities to increase the diversity of our audience. We have done a lot of deliberate hiring of people... and the whole relevance of the [name] Garden has increased as a result of all this work.”

–A Garden Administrator

33 put it, “We’ve attracted more people through our food programs, and we’ve lowered the prices to participate in [a] community garden. We see the spectrum.” Food Programs Sell Fundraising “[food programs] are not the hardest thing to raise money for, I’ll say that. According to the survey, 51% of gardens It’s actually been crazy successful offering food system programs indicated from day one when we started our these programs were an asset to their CSA and we got funding from [health garden’s fundraising goals, while 20% care foundation], which eventually indicated they were not (Question #40). grew to be about $600-$700K to get Interviews suggest that the fundraising the entire operation underway with impacts of these food programs may be even all the equipment and everything greater. Gardens of all sizes agreed that their else; to funding that we’ve been able food programs attract new funding from to attract for every component of it: the outreach component, the both public and private sources, improve veteran’s component, the horticulture staff morale, and make for compelling therapy component. People really development appeals in general. As one like the program. I think if we could garden administrator put it: make that the hallmark of what we raise money for then we would rarely [We] are in constant contact with our development department, and they are get a “no”. We might not get what always really thankful for us sharing not only we ask for, but we would rarely get a personal stories of program participants, “no”. The problem is, there’s a lot of but also the activities and things that we’re other [institutional] needs.” doing in the community. It really plays well –A Garden Administrator for them to be able to represent who we are, who we’re reaching, and what we’re about when they’re speaking to funders and other supporters. Food Programs Make Compelling Gardens with annual budgets greater than Stories $10M identified their food programs as “[If] you’ve got a diverse array of having attracted health care grants and programs, particularly programs that health industry sponsors, as well as agro- are serving the community in a meaningful way, your donors are food industry support. One garden going to notice that – whether it’s administrator described their food program foundations or individuals. It just fundraising appeals “like adding an arts makes a much stronger case in our program to a garden; it opens up a lot of community for support, and that to doors and allows you to make more me is a really fundamental thing….” connections.” –A Garden Administrator

34 Gardens with annual budgets less than $3M “Good for Our Esprit de Corps” and greater than $10M receive city agency “So those [food] stories are …also and state funding for their food programs, good for our esprit de corps at the and a number receive federal USDA, garden itself …... even if you’re in Department of Education and Institute for administration doing book-keeping, Museum and Library Services (IMLS) you still feel like your organization is funding. One garden noted that a major doing something positive for the challenge to food program mission work is community, so it gives you more pride that the programs are not self-sustaining – for your organization.” there is typically not a business plan that –A Garden Administrator transitions programs that are reliant on grants and GOS to earned revenue self- sufficiency; however, a number of gardens Future Growth in Budget, Earned have succeeded in creating non-trivial Revenues, and Expanded Funding revenue income from sales of produce, Reflects Program Success program fees, and technical assistance “Yes, I expect the food program contracts. budgets will continue growing because the programs continue to grow. I hope Three gardens with operating budgets we’ve proven over the years that we greater than $10M, and one garden with an can increase our earned revenues from operating budget of less than $3M, produce sales and workshops and tech elaborated on their expectations for food assistance and contracts, so I’d like to program funding in the future. Two gardens continue to increase our earned expect growth in their food program revenues, but in terms of raised budgets – and consequentially growth in revenues we’re opening up opportunities with some of our their programs – from earned revenue and expanded collaborations, with the expanded funding sources. Another garden health care industries in particular, to described the potential to increase funding open doors to expanded funding opportunities with agricultural organizations sources.” and corporations. One garden with an –A Garden Administrator operating budget less than $3M described an increase in research funding for very specific projects.

Career Opportunities Interviewed gardens of all sizes offer training and intern programs in their food-related programming that can lead to a career path; however, only a few gardens recruit staff from those training programs for garden employment. One garden with a budget in

35 excess of $10M and an intentional training-employment strategy in place, described their career opportunities as including: Teen Program is a Source of …everything from entry-level positions for graduates of our programs, to people who are Employee Recruitment in management roles, and even working “There is a career track associated through the career ladder through with the teen program. It wasn’t in organizations that they started with. For the beginning. A few years back I example, here we have people start in the was at a conference and we were packing room, and move up through the ranks talking about job diversity, and I to floor supervisor. We’ve seen that not just at said I put a job description out and [garden program] but also at [employers of didn’t get many replies, and program graduates] a number of places we’ve someone said to me: you grow seen that progression your own – you grow your own plants. I sort of looked inward and said, oh, yeah, I never thought of Several gardens with operating budgets less that. It was sort of a challenge at than $10M described their teen and internship the time. And I took it and I said, programs as providing valuable resume well yeah!’ building skills to participating youth, and one –A Garden Administrator garden that offers college coursework says its programs equip participants with skills needed by outside employers.

Sustainability Sustainability as Land Sixty-nine percent of surveyed gardens offering Stewardship food system programs indicated that those “So we’re not just producing food, programs positively impact the sustainability we’re able to build soil, maintain operations of their garden, while 31% indicated soil fertility, and build a more that food programs have no impact on diverse habitat on the farm, sustainability operations (Question #41). supporting pollinators and other Interview responses provided needed detail on wildlife that are part of the farm what sustainability impacts mean. Gardens of ecosystem, so not just straight all sizes define their food program sustainability food production, but thinking of it impacts, in part, by the sustainable agricultural as building as much diversity as possible for other wildlife. ” management practices used at their garden sites, particularly practices that increase –A Garden Administrator biodiversity and employ water conservation methods. As one garden administrator put it:

36 Our core focus, when it comes to sustainability, is growing food in the most efficient way possible, using the least amount of water. So, down at [off site program location] we’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with no-till agriculture, and looking at how we track carbon sequestration, and use of organic fertilizers and how much water we’re using, and how to conserve the most water, what sort of complementary crops work out. So, we have a lot of things going on down there, trying to figure out as we teach people this, let’s make sure it’s water smart and sustainable. Only three gardens described sustainability impacts unrelated to agricultural practices, and that includes the building of a LEED certified building, the direct purchasing of garden-grown produce by food service partners, and the way in which their garden’s food program contributes to the sustainability goals of the city. As one garden administrator put it:

[City] has a triple bottom line – environmental, economic, and social. And the [garden’s edible garden] hits all of that; generating funding, teaching sustainable practices, and providing opportunities for anyone to participate.

Media Coverage Diverse Programming Attracts Media The majority of gardens offering “Our local media loves us. I have to say they food system programs (69%) come here quite often, and a lot of times they’ll indicated that those programs be covering an upcoming food or cooking class that we have here. In the summer it might be positively impact the media live theatre, but they’re here all the time, and coverage of their garden, while 31% it’s a good working relationship, and I have to indicate that food programs have no give props to our marketing Department on impact on media coverage that.” (Question #42). Interviewed –A Garden Administrator gardens of all sizes confirmed that their food programs attract television and print coverage, Gardens do Everything particularly during special events, “I think the best thing about it is when people during food theme years, and for find out we’re doing this kind of thing, they’re cooking show demonstrations and surprised by it, and they think: “I had no idea chef weekends. Gardens that have that the gardens do that.” And as soon as they kitchen demo facilities are well ask that question, or make that statement in situated to hold events that can their head, then they’re open to learning all achieve both television and print the things that we do all around the world, and media coverage. One garden how interesting all that is.” received national exposure for –A Garden Administrator helping First Lady Michelle Obama

37 plant the White House vegetable garden, and several gardens reported media coverage for the water management of their food gardens and for their outreach and training programs, whether for school and community gardening activities or adult training programs.

38 9. The Role of the American Public Gardens Association

Food Program Support An opportunity for advocacy Interviews suggest that “I think that the collective voice is important. Having gardens of all budget sizes made a presentation at the American Public Gardens have some overlapping Association meeting several years ago when it was in priorities for how the American Columbus, I actually met other people from botanical Public Gardens Association gardens who were doing this kind of work, and it was can support food very exciting to actually spend time with people who programming. Gardens of all had the same passion for it that we do, and to learn sizes would like to see the from them. Actually, to turn up the volume American Public Gardens underneath that message is really going to help the Association provide a forum American Public Gardens Association overall. In the for sharing food and same way it’s helped the [City} Botanical Garden, there’s a level of relevance that it affords. agriculture programming best practices and resources – such What the American Public Gardens Association can as curricula or program do for that is just nurture it, provide the opportunity evaluation protocols – or by for sharing of knowledge and celebrating what’s working. You know, advocating at the governmental increasing the number of level. I don’t know if that’s what they do, but I think annual conference sessions on it’s an important way to really increase the overall food and food-related performance of gardens in every way and size.” programming. As one garden –A Garden Administrator administrator described it, “I

Creating an Interdisciplinary Forum for Discussion “Most definitely as a forum for describing best practices… a forum for botanic gardens of all sizes to focus in on this topic, and the resources that they bring to bear, and how they’re re-engaging their public audiences on this topic, how they are intentionally partnering with community organizations so they can make more of an impact in food systems… as a member of their communities and a leading cultural resource in their community, I think botanic gardens play a really important role in leading the discussion and serving as a forum …or convener of discussions, so that different perspectives from corporations, to big agriculture, to more innovative small farm systems can come together and unpack an issue and answer questions from the public. I think the role that gardens can play is really significant in our communities.”

–A Garden Administrator

39 think identifying best practice and models and programs for replication, and help with doing that… there’s a lot I don’t know about because I’m in this cocoon. So just benchmarking, best practice; so who is it, what’s going on, how can I replicate? “

The survey and interview data makes it clear that virtually all gardens that participated in this research project believe that supporting food-related programs is a compelling role for the American Public Gardens Association.

Food Session Ideas for Future Conferences Several gardens identified conferences as important networking opportunities that Hosting a Professional Section could develop into future garden “holding a professional section at a collaborations. Several food session topics botanic garden that is doing extensive were identified for future conferences, food programming would be specifically: the role of agricultural interesting, because if you have a technologies; how gardens can facilitate chance to talk to the program complex, politically-charged food participants, and you see the programs discussions; food and agriculture exhibits in action, it’s a very different thing than as immersive experiences; designing food having one person stand up and talk gardens; preventing vandalism; organic, about it.” sustainable agricultural and horticultural A Garden Administrator practices; and food programming for families and children. All gardens with annual budgets over $3M said they would be interested in joining the food and agriculture section, and all gardens with annual budgets less than $3M said they would be interested in learning more. One garden mentioned that it would helpful to hold a meeting of this section at a garden with extensive food programming.

A Session on Facilitating Discussion “I think one [idea] would be equipping us all as botanic gardens and botanic garden educator professionals to facilitate planning discussions around complex, somewhat politically charged conversations. …And I think a session focused on that, and providing resources and guidance for how botanic gardens in any community can facilitate those discussions and gather people around the table. How can we facilitate a conversation that’s fact based, that represents multiple different perspectives, that takes into consideration some of the biggest challenges of our day, of our time, as far as food and poverty and health. I think that would be a much valued session topic.”

–A Garden Administrator

40 Networking Time is Needed “I think having networking time so people who are interested in talking would be good. I think what we run into is that during the sessions, we spend an hour talking, and ½ hour for questions, and there’s never enough time for people to finish asking their questions... for people sitting around a table to start talking about ways that we can work together or share information and experiences with people who might be interested in starting a similar program. So I don’t know if APGA supports those kinds of networking opportunities, but I think that would be valuable.”

–A Garden Administrator

41 Appendix A –Supplemental Survey Tables

Table A-1: Factors Limiting Gardens from Developing Food Programs (Question #3)

Factors Not at all Very Neither Very Extremely Total Important Unimportant Important nor Important Important Responses Unimportant Food 0 2 3 2 2 9 programming is not currently relevant to our mission Limited staff 0 0 1 5 4 10 resources Limited 0 0 2 4 4 10 financial resources Limited space 3 1 5 1 0 10 Other (please 1 0 1 2 2 6 specify)

Table A-2: Short Answer “Other” Responses to Factors Limiting Gardens from Developing Food Programs too thin in staff with all part time people Other (please specify) Security concerns edible native plants haven't been given much attention. We want to change that. We are building a 2 acre food and herb garden

Table A-3: Reasons Gardens Not Currently Offering Food-related Programming Would Offer Food-Related Programming in the Future (Question #4)

Question Very Unlikely Unlikely Undecided Likely Very Likely Total Responses Current 0 0 3 6 2 11 audience expressing interest Other (please 1 0 1 0 2 4 specify) To attract new 0 0 0 4 7 11 audiences To fulfill an 0 0 4 3 4 11

42 area of our mission

Table A-4: Short Answer “Other” Responses to Likelihood of Reasons Gardens not Currently Offering Food-Related Programing would Offer Food-Related Programming in the Future

Other (please specify) staff member making it her particular job to begin a CSA without reach to youth introduce the public to native plants that are good sources of food

Table A-5: Importance of Factors in a Garden's Decision Not to Offer Food-Related Programming (Question #5)

Question Not at all Very Neither Very Extremely Total Important Unimportant Important nor Important Important Responses Unimportant Food 0 0 0 1 3 4 programming is not relevant to our mission Limited staff 0 0 0 1 3 4 resources Limited 0 0 1 1 2 4 financial resources Limited space 0 0 0 0 4 4 Other (please 0 0 0 0 1 1 specify)

Table A-6: Importance of Factors in a Garden’s Decision to Discontinue Food-Related Programming (Question # 6)

Question Not at all Very Neither Very Extremely Total Important Unimportant Important nor Important Important Responses Unimportant Food 1 0 1 1 0 3 programming is not relevant to our mission Limited staff 1 0 0 1 1 3 resources Limited 1 0 1 0 1 3 financial

43 resources Limited space 2 0 0 1 0 3 Other (please 1 0 0 0 1 2 specify)

Table A-7: Short Answer “other” Responses to Factors in a Garden’s Decision to Discontinue Food-Related Programming

Other (please specify) Nearby non-profit offers robust urban agriculture programs.

Table A-8: Written Responses for Reasons Why an Institution Decided to Discontinue its Food-Related Program (Question #7)

Text Response Loss of sponsorship, more emphasis on pollinators, five summers of Edible Garden programs were successful but felt the need to engage in a new program emphasis on pollinators with a live butterfly exhibit Vegetable Garden has been closed because of limited financial and staff resources. see Other above.

Table A-9: Short Answer “Other” Responses to Food-Related Activities Offered by Gardens (Question #8)

Other (please specify) production for resale Intensive farming to provide families in need in Southwest Philadelphia with healthy nutritious food options. community gardens garden tours Produce food for the Cafe Chocolate confectionary program Orchard and vineyard Vegetable markets in food deserts, coffee research globally, veteran's program (job training and rehabilitation), feeding communities curriculum used at local university, teaching gardens at urban housing development, community garden management, community farm. public tours campus farm Field day w/taste-testing & recipes Active with SC Agritourism Association meetings, outreach Summer Camps, School Outreach

44 Produce donations to Food Bank Farmers Markets and Garden Plot programs food distributions technical assistance High School programming and Farm to School gardens Job training A collaboration with the Community Garden at the Park harvest vegetables and then donate to charity community garden Summer Children's Program see arboretum.org "over the fence" outreach education fruit breeding community garden

Table A-10: Short Answer “Other” Responses for Primary Audiences for Garden Displays (Question #9)

Other (please specify) currently, our food research is private General audiences and college students owners undergraduate/graduate students children college students Businesses Specific displays targeted to all of the audiences listed

Table A-11: Identified Importance of Resources to Achieve Goals (Question #34)

Question Not at all Very Neither Very Extremely Total Important Unimportant Important Important Important Responses nor Unimportant Additional 1 1 12 31 31 76 staff resources Financial 1 2 8 34 31 76 resources Garden 4 3 14 33 22 76 space

45 Other (please 4 0 5 14 12 35 specify)

Table A-12: Short Answer “Other” Responses for Identified Importance of Resources to Achieve Goals (Questions #34)

Other (please specify) Partnerships with lead organizations distribution partner(s) for produce Partners mission of the expanded organization Venders Defined concepts and strategies. marketing support marketing, to gain the needed audience Always looking for more partners marketing community support embracing as part of mission Outside partnerships Marketing in the community Our volunteers-primarily students, staff, and local residents Collaboration with local high school Local government support Evaluation of program goals This garden will be planted and maintained by all volunteers - materials (seeds, compost, etc.) will all be donated. A broader understanding of 'display garden' partnerships across the community Additional classroom space Policies set in place to support the operation Products Master Gardeners/volunteers to partner with Marketing for programs expertise and community connections

46 Table A-13: Correlation of Selected Survey Response with Garden’s Food Budget

Correlation Coefficient

-0.1 0 0.1 0.2 0.3 0.4 0.5 0.6 0.7 Q22 impact on expanding relationships Q63 impacted media coverage 0.16 Q62 impacted the sustainability 0.36 Q20 impact on fundraising goals 0.28 Q18 impacted on diversity 0.58 Q17 Food related budget 0.25 total staff Q16_3 Seasonal staff 0.36 Q16_2 Part-time year-round staff 0.31 Q16_1 Full-time year-round staff 0.40 Q15_3 Garden space 0.51 Q15_2 Financial resources Q15_1 Additional staff resources 0.26 Q13_7 Other 0.14 Q13_6 Agrobiodiversity 0.01 Q13_5 Organic vs. non-organic production 0.28 Q13_4 Biotechnology 0.38 Q13_3 Food systems' impact on the environment 0.36 Q13_2 Food security 0.26 Q13_1 Feeding a growing population 0.37 Sum production related activities 0.42 Q12_10 Other 0.38 Q12_9 Soil health and fertility Q12_8 Permaculture 0.19 Q12_7 Organic agriculture 0.34 Q12_6 integrated Pest Management 0.28 Q12_5 Conventional farming 0.27 Q12_4 Home food gardening 0.21 Q12_3 Hydroponics 0.04 Q12_2 Aquaponics 0.06 Q12_1 Agrobiodiversity 0.19 Sum of Aspects 0.56 Q11_6 Environmental impacts 0.22 Q11_5 Food policies 0.53 Q11_4 Consumption 0.32 Q11_3 Distribution 0.37 Q11_2 Processing 0.28 Q11_1 Production 0.10 length of food related activities (Q10) 0.29 Total # of Food Activities 0.57 Research 0.42 Training programs 0.51 Other 0.15 Food crop collections or food seed banks 0.32 Culinary programs 0.35 Exhibits 0.16 Lectures 0.28 Classes 0.15 Garden displays 0.24

47 Appendix B –Interview Responses

Key: Gardens with annual budgets greater* than $10M (LX), Gardens with annual budgets* between $3-10M (MX), Gardens with annual budgets* less than $3M (SX), where numbers (X) distinguish gardens of each classification.

*Annual budget data provided by the 2015. Gardens Survey. Public Gardens Benchmarking Study. American Public Gardens Association, September 2015 (Based on data collected for fiscal year 2014).

Respondents’ Extended Description of Program Activities (Q1 and Q2)

M3 Our biggest food service programming involves our culinary partners, Service Systems Associates (SSA), and basically the food we grow goes to their facility, and also food goes to the zoo for animal enrichment.

We have two gardens. We have one that we call a crop field; it’s an acre. And then we have another, smaller, that we call our kitchen garden. In our acre space, we grow mainly green chilies, which are so popular here, and then sunflowers for the birds. Again, all of our green chili goes to SSA, and we work with them the season before to figure out exactly what they want us to grow. So that’s the main thing that we do on the culinary front. SSA is the food service operating at the garden, just a couple of blocks from the barn.

The acre and kitchen garden are part of the [Our] Farm, and it’s about 10 acres. It’s big, we have 500 apple trees, 300 grape vines, we have an acre where we turn our animals out to pasture – our horses and goats, our cow. Then we have our kitchen garden, and a place where we grow our berries: our raspberries. We have a barn for our animals.

S6 Being a college, we do have community gardens on campus and we have two organic farms that are not located on campus, but on college property. So when you think about that whole list of everything we provide, it encompasses the three locations of the educational programs.

[The number of people who participate annually in our food-related programs both on the campus and at offsite locations is in the] 75-100 person range. Students that are involved and community members, and farmers participate in events held at the farms, and also community members who participate in actually growing in the community garden plots.

L6 We have some food display areas, but we don’t have any programming – we’re not doing any classes or programs related to it. In our Children’s Garden, we have an area called “[name] garden” that’s a picnic area for kids, and it’s all landscaped with edibles. When I answer that [survey question], I was thinking we’re going to have [a] great food garden that we’re going to build. It’s called “[Food Garden],” and we’re just wrapping up fundraising and we’ve got a little ways to go here, but it will be about an $8 million garden.

48 “[Food Garden]” is a 2-acre site, located next to our visitors education pavilion, close to our main entrance. It’s a nice location that has an elevation change of probably about 20’ from top to bottom. We’re going to be creating this garden on a terraced hillside, if you will. It overlooks [the] lake, which is a nice man-made lake here in [our City], and was our original water source back at turn of the century. It has a great view across the lake, a vista of this garden. And across the lake, centered in that view, is the skyline of downtown [City] about 5 miles away. So it’s got that “wow” factor from a vista perspective. Off to one side, kind of in back of it, our back parking lot is going to be a food pavilion. It’s a really beautiful building that will be glass on three sides with a copper roof, where we can do cooking demonstrations, have classes. You can clear the room and have events, and the building will seat about 150 people for an event or a sit down dinner. We’ll be using that for all sorts of things, it’s multipurpose, but one of its primary functions is having cooking classes and other gardening demonstrations that we might want to do there.

As far as adult education, our Education group is working on programming for 12 months of the year. We have a mild winter climate and can grow a lot of vegetables in the, growing cool season crops in the winter. From that programming will have classes and we’ll also have just demonstrations each day that are 10 minutes or so, so our visitors can pick up tips or knowledge or work something quick, and have that be apart of their visit. And each day we’ll have tastings where we’re offering something from the garden. So those are the layers of interactive program we’ll have each day in the garden.

Also, as you come out of that pavilion and come across the food garden, there’s a wide walk about 20’ wide, that’s all one grade, and one of the benefits of that walk is we can have farm-to-table dinners, and have tables lined up outside along the wide walk, that will prepare food grown at the garden itself.

Our goal is to break ground late this summer or early fall at the latest, and if we do that we’ll be able to open this in fall of 2017. That’s our plan.

L3 Horticultural Therapy -- Veterans to farmers programs were a way to be employed, and also as a way to give them an outlet for some of their PTSD issues. We have really formalized that, and now we give the vets a stipend and they work out of [Our] Farms, and then we incorporate horticultural therapy as part of their program. And then we hire a couple of them to actually run the farmers markets in the food deserts. And we’re even talking about adding some greenhouse space over time so that we can grow for 12 months out of the year.

The coffee research happens at the Center for Global Initiatives – and it’s really looking at different areas around the world and understanding the genetics of different coffee crops there, to try to see if there’s any diversity at all, because vulnerabilities are really about rust blights going around. Really about biodiversity. The Director at the Center for Global Initiatives, she’s working with a number of global research projects. She’s actually taking the lead on a project that will take her to south Sudan, and go to West Africa soon, to several countries there. She’s also involved with The Crop Trust. They just finished a major project on chocolate, and now they’ve brought her in to lead the project on coffee.

49 M2 Community garden, so a lot of growing involved, whether horticulture education, outreach, or providing demonstrations to community gardeners.

I do outreach to a couple hundred gardens in our community, so that involves a lot of people: from the garden leaders to the participants to the actual folks benefitting from the program. So that’s probably in the thousands, I suppose, of people reached and participants of those programs. And then inside, Interviewee 1 may know some of these numbers better, but our culinary programs, food education, even exhibits that we do that are centered around food or growing – that could also reach into the thousands. Total participation in the [job training] program…this year, we recruited twelve and graduated 11 in the [job training] program.

S5 The community garden outreach program is part of the [food garden]. Then we have a “Plant It Forward” program, which is a community service program on behalf of food banks.

The [food garden] is the onsite garden. Activities include a greenhouse production for food crops. And that is in partnership with [State University] Horticultural Department and [local] Community College. And all of the revenues go back into the Horticultural Departments of the three institutions. These revenues come from the annual plant sale.

M1 The conferences at the policy level that reach multi-sector audiences, and have a component of year-round stakeholder engagement. And the two main ones are the food summit, and the school garden conference – those are the two that have the main connections to food growing and food systems. Both are at the policy level and engage multi-sector audiences, and are part of year-round stakeholder engagement groups where there’s a planning team that works all year. When we intentionally engage stakeholders across sectors –public sector, private sector, academia, local units of government, state government – in planning and larger events. Participants in conference are statewide, and sometimes neighboring states. Whether were presenting research based information, or whether we’re looking at best practices, or case studies around the country, or perhaps engaging a spokesperson, like a Mark Bittman, or a Michael Pollan, or someone like that – a spokesperson, if you will, that will get everybody fired up. That’s one level, and those conferences generally attract somewhere between 250 and 450 people/participants. And they’re mostly target audiences in those sectors. There’s some concerned citizens, interested folks that come – maybe 15% -- but 85% of the audience are from those sectors, so they’re professionals, and what we would identify as change agents. And those stakeholder groups that have those change agents are the same ones on the planning team, and are usually chosen, of course, because of their ability to cause change. So there’s an intentionality behind it that’s a little different from a regular keynote address conference.

I’ve a new hat working with the state Master Gardener Program. In that role, I’m working on redefining the priority areas of the Master Gardener Program on a statewide basis – the content areas -- and one of them is growing food, both in backyard and for others, not production ag, but growing food for others as in “for community” – so for yourself or for your community, and that’s broadly “for your community” – it could be for a school, for a living food, but some kind of

50 intentional growing of food for home or community. And of the priority areas that I’m setting within the state Master Gardener Program, that’s one of them. And localized food system, so growing food and supporting localized food systems through the Master Gardener Program. So the extension folks at the [local land-grant university] have asked, if we combine the arboretum education department and the statewide Master Gardener program together, and created a new model called A Continuum of Learning. The main point of that is working within a… you know there’s 2,400 master gardeners in 77 counties in the state. As we reprioritize what are the messages that master gardeners will carry out in their local community. One of the content areas is this growing food, supporting localized food systems, and growing food in the most sustainable way that we can. And then engaging citizens around the state through that program by training master gardeners with that content and delivering that content at the local level. So that’s another more statewide approach.

Our third program is the plant-breeding program. And that’s apples, grapes, blueberries, pears, strawberries, but that’s a more academic research. And of course we build that into our educational programs, both at the [site] and through the master gardener program, children through adults. It’s mostly an awareness of the process. Also our goals for that one is just to make people aware.

And next is the model-gardens – and I think you used a different term on the [survey] list. So we have vegetable gardens on site here, and then pop-up gardens throughout the city – and that’s an urban project. And bee and pollination center associated with the garden, which is almost done. We open at the end of June. So the bee and pollination center opens at the [our] Farm Campus/Garden. The first building to open there is that bee and pollination center. And then from there, we’re working on redoing the [our] Barn is next, so that we can get people to dance at the parties and harvest celebrations and all that. Also then, modeling food production on multiple scales starting with urban ag niches up to city lots, and bigger and bigger and move up to the 28 acres. Since that building will anchor the site, the main message there is we’re looking at the food system, but for a model garden. When someone arrives on the site, they’ll not only experience the food system – a multi-scale food system and the production – but they’ll also explore the role of pollinators within that food system. Because of it being a pollination center at its core. So it shifts it a little from like a historic farm, or a typical here’s the farm and here’s the plants, and those are good -- don’t get me wrong – it’s just that we’re adding that piece in there and acknowledging that fact that the role of bees and native pollinators is absolutely crucial in our system. So, from a model point of view, you walk into that part of our campus and see that right there. So that’s model gardens, and then outreach of course. You’re familiar with our urban gardens programs and our urban work experience programs – all of that, we’re near 35 years on that. It’s the same thing of urban youth employment.

The urban offsite locations—there’s two main areas to that: one is education for children k-to grade 5, and those are a basic how-to garden science based and nutrition garden that reaches 225 children a year at five to six different sites and in partnership with different community agencies in [city name] and [city name]. So that’s the younger kid program. The work experience program employs 55 teenagers in different work teams with different goals and objections. Some are entrepreneurial based, some are based in nonprofit work, some are based in leadership development.

The last one is the enrichment stuff. And not discounting it again, but it’s the regular authors, food classes, wine classes – what I would call traditional adult enrichment around food and food system,

51 and they’re fairly common at botanic gardens to do that. Again, I’m not diminishing that, just acknowledging that it’s there.

L4 Things we’re doing in the community, that’s not on our site. We are very active in a community gardening project in [our city]. So that’s happening in a neighborhood in the north part of the city, [and] that is a priority area for the City for investment, as far as community engagement and repurposing of vacant lots. So, I would say in addition to those on that list – which primarily are things that happen on our garden site, at the [L4] site – I would add the community gardening project we do in partnership with [our city].

[Program name] is the leading urban agricultural organization here in [our city]. They have their roots, if you will, as an affiliate of [L4], so they got their start here, with us. And just a few years ago they decided to become their own separate 501c3. And after that, they are growing and prospering, and we remain a great partner of theirs and vice versa. So we work with them on a variety of different things, and in fact just last week we worked on a collaborative grant proposal. But these particular garden projects that I’m talking about [the ones in partnership with our city], are ones [that] the [L4] is taking a lead on with [our city] because of this urban vitality project that they have, that the garden is a big partner on. The City has 20,000 vacant lots, 10,000 of which they own, and they have identified priority neighborhoods in which they are linking their cultural partners, in the this case [L4], with those priority neighborhoods in ways that allow us to share some expertise and some resources in terms of instruction and engagement and materials, like plants, and soil and use. And as such we are in this project called the [Name] Pilot Project, in a neighborhood called [Name] in [area of our city]. And last year we repurposed 2 vacant lots and turned it into an activity garden with raised beds for local use with local residents.

Midwest food crop research – [name of person] works w/ The Land Institute, and is working on a perennial horticulture exhibit at the garden. But that’s one example where we’re working with [name of person] and her research and connecting with visitors about perennial horticultures. The exhibit will be a mix of different landscape displays. That’s one example where we’re working with [name of person] and developing exhibits that pose different questions to visitors around agriculture, and different systems of agriculture, and different ways of getting food to tables.

The [name of] Project is interesting. That was another one we were involved with last year and will be involved with this year. That’s a project that’s not actually our project, it’s a community-based project in – again – [area of our city], but working with urban youth. It actually is kind of a business program that teaches entrepreneurial skills and soft job skills to use. But again, the sweet potatoes are the basis. So they learn to grow sweet potatoes, then make products like sweet potato cookies, and sell them and market them in a facility operated and run and promoted by local youth. So we managed one of the community sites in which these sweet potatoes were grown and harvested to use. So that’s another nice community connection.

M4 We have a coalition of school gardens that are food based that we provide support to, both through training and through a lending library. The other one would be a strong food orientation for our therapeutic horticultural training programs, and a food program for exceptional teenagers that is food based.

52 Garden to Table Programs, which is a training program for culinary art students (high school and college). They’re here every week. Where they learn to garden, and they learn to utilize plants form the garden. Collaboration with [local] vocational college with a high school in it – they’re our partners in the Garden to Table Programs.

In addition, we have the following: Workshops and lectures, the school garden program, We have food based summer camp programs, The therapeutic programs described earlier

S3 Training comes in a couple different forms. One, we have a second campus. One of the main outreach and educations components of what we do is through a program called “[name of program]” and we have a separate campus, or second campus, that is urban and is home to the [our local] urban agriculture center, which is the urban agricultural center for [S3]. And we built this agricultural center and educational hub at that location because that was where the bulk of the people we serve through our community garden outreach program live and work, and have their gardens. So we have a network of 127 community gardens that we support in some fashion out of that hub. So their training comes in two components: 1) we have a lot of educational workshops and programming that happens around how to grow food and we have demonstration gardens, and we have techniques of a demonstrative nature that are offered on that property, and that people can not only come in and view but have hands-on engagement with. So there’s a lot of education in that section, and that goes from early childhood through death, so the range of audience there is broad for these programs. In addition, we have a number of people who intern with us, who will be learning how to go on to make this a profession, perhaps, of growing in some fashion. Food and sustainability and all of these things are pretty hot right now, and so we attract attention around that from people who are interested in making a career of this. We also have, in terms of training education, as part of the community gardening network, we have a community garden council that meets monthly to share, we share with them findings, we do advocacy with them, and they share a lot of knowledge and resources with each other. In addition, we have a job training program through a relationship with the juvenile courts system. So the courts system has a program called CITE, and I couldn’t off the top of my head tell you what that stands for. But we have a program whereby young men, in particular, coming out of juvenile detention spend several months with us learning how to reintegrate with the community in a non-criminal fashion. And we teach them on a platform of community gardening, facilities management and whatnot. So they are learning soft skills like teambuilding, how to incorporate constructive criticism, how to show up on time, how to speak to somebody clearly, how to look someone in the eye and shake their hand. You know there’s all these soft skills that some of these kids have not had a role model for. But we also, at the same time, we’re teaching landscaping, how to garden, how to grow food, how to raise chickens, how to harvest honey. You know, all of that. So it’s all interlaced.

The young men that we work with generally range from 16-19 [years old]. So these are kids who’ve really served their time, they maybe are on the tail end of it, but they’re largely transitioning back into the community. And they get a stipend as part of their involvement.

[Our local] Urban Ag center is on two large city lots, and the education center is a building, and we have three green houses, and we have many, many raised beds. And we grow year round, demonstrating how your can use greenhouse techniques to grow year-round.

53 S4 Yes, we have been doing research into food choices, some human-behavior psychology research into people’s awareness about their food choices. One of the things that we do is that we have a food demonstration garden and the food is harvested weekly and donated to a local food bank. So there’s a food security aspect.

L5 Also to create an environment within the larger field of professional development – conceptualizing and creating the American Public Gardens Association professional section, as well as the work we did with the Agricultural Tri-Societies for an academic publication on Agriculture and the future of Food, the Role of Botanic Gardens.

Description of food-related program/activity goals (Q3)

M3 We’re trying to heighten awareness about agriculture in general, and we are here in the Valley of the [large river], and the land we’re on was historically farmed. So, we’re basically trying to connect people back to the land by demonstrating through an immersion experience at the farm how crops are grown, what food looks like before processing. I’ve seen children who are amazed at the way grapes grow. They see ‘em in the grocery store but they don’t see them on the vine. So, we’re just trying to connect people back to the land and let them see the value of growing crops for their own use. That’s part of what we do with classes and things like that.

L1 A number of goals. One is engaging with individuals who wouldn’t necessarily visit the [L1], particularly those [residents] living on the south and west side and who are not as mobile or typical guests of the botanic garden. So taking our garden programs outside the typical constituency. Also, in terms of the programming itself, looking at training and job skills development, our goal is definitely looking at job placement rates for both of our [veteran] population and those of our certificate program, both have really high success rates for placement. Our apprenticeship has a 91% placement rate, and the, um, and our Corps program, which is our transitional jobs program, we’re back up to about a 76% job placement rate for that program. So job training and placement is important.

Food Access is also important, and one of our goals is to make sure we are distributing produce to communities that do not have access to fresh food, so 50% of our produce now is distributed through the Women Infants and Children program and also through community based farmstands and farmers’ markets.

Yes, sure, the other programming that the garden offers around food systems work is classes through the adult education program and also a fruit and vegetable garden [...]. The fruit and vegetable garden is a display garden that uses veggies in an edible landscaping fashion and introduces vegetables to people who may have not seen them before. It’s an opportunity for

54 people to see how you grow vegetables in a way that’s aesthetically pretty too, so it’s general education, and same thing with adult Ed, I think it’s people who are interested in learning how to do container gardens, or to learn the basics around growing food.

S6 The specifics of the programs are to provide the students and community members with real hands- on experiences, experiential learning, based on food production and processing. So I think the hands-on piece is really specific, and also within that, talking about sustainable management and sustainable farming methods that are reducing impacts on the environment and on the land where we’re actually growing of food. And then we also try to tie that into a bigger, more global look at the world and the impacts of food production on communities, and environmental communities as well across the globe. When looking more locally, it’s how we do it specifically around the world and how different systems operate, particularly industrial systems.

We [also] have a sustainable food system and agriculture program set. So students can take courses in that subject matter, and that range of topics, yes.

L6 There’s a cooking component, in how you can use things. And one thing I’ve experienced is that people don’t know what to do with fresh things that they’ve grown. Part of the demonstration process is to showcase what you can do with kale, for instance, although kale’s all trendy now and out there. But there’s lots of bad ways to serve kale to people, but it can be really good if you do it right. But a lot of these things, for instance kohlrabi, nobody would know what to do with kohlrabi, that’s part of the thinking along the lines of how to help with the cooking side. Also, demonstrations on how to plant, what grows when. People can come and see, this is what I can grow in December in [our city]. Right here I see all of these wonderful things. Wow, that the best- looking lettuce I’ve ever seen.

L3 It all goes back to our core values, and food was a way that we could connect people to plants in one of the most fundamental relationships we have in communities where there may not be a desire or a connection in coming to the space. So it’s a matter of us going out and interacting with them in their own communities in a way that’s powerful and helps make the connection to the world of plants. So, it lives out our diversity core value, it lives out our sustainability core value, and our relevance core value, and even our transformation core value – those are our four core values. So it’s serving all of those things. And in our marketing department its actually called our Marketing and Social Responsibility Department now, because we really feel a sense of responsibility to tackle issues where we have something to offer, where we can really make a difference and improving a lot of society overall. So, it’s not going to be some research into a disease or something, but we can help out with access to fresh food, and we can help out with horticulture therapy programs for autistic children. We can find lots of ways to connect with people and offer something valuable, then we should if we can. If we can, we should.

55 [on the transformation value] It’s my favorite of our four core values, because it’s the shift that occurs after or during an interaction with us. If there’s no transformation, then you approached an issue, you approached a visitor, but nothing actually happened. Transformation is when they come in stressed and worn down and they leave refreshed and uplifted. A transformation occurs in something of an “A Ha” moment when water and air interact with the plant, and they realize the plant is actually growing from the air but it needs the water. You know, just some fundamental understandings of science happen. That’s a transformation that occurs.

M2 All of our programming and activities are tied to our mission statement, which I’m happy to email to you. But it’s really all concentrated around quality of life and connecting our community, our broader community through educational, cultural and social experiences. And we feel very strongly that food is an integral part of that. You find an element of food, or food education and nutrition in every one of the programs that we provide here. When you think about our summer camps, we have several that are culinary based. When I think about the [name]program that we’re doing with formal schools in the area, one of our challenges is a cook-off. So, just about every program that we provide here has some element of food in it. Even our horticulture classes, a lot of them are geared toward understanding where our food comes from, how to grow it successfully, etc. etc.

S5 Classes – I provide a lot of classes. That is tied to our vision/mission. So I provide a lot of the food growing classes. In addition, we received grant funding to pilot a family gardening program, in which we recruited low-income families and taught them to grow food and use food. So the funders changed direction, so now we have our community gardens program. We took that curriculum and providing education to six community gardens. I also provide technical assistance for people who want to start gardens.

We have an outdoor teaching facility here, and wanted to do a seed to table program. So the first part of those cooking classes is going out into the garden, and I show them how to collect produce for the cooking class that night’s dinner.

We have been able to tailor now some of our special events, and our annual fare dinners are highlighting the produce grown in the [food garden]. As we’ve had that garden, we’ve attracted more food vendors and booths associated with food.

Training at community gardens, also I host every year service learning groups, and host our county conservation corps, which is one of the few conservation corps that has an Agri-corps. So that is young people ages 15-16.

We host both (garden) paid and unpaid interns here. And they work with all the horticulturalists to receive a broad spectrum of skill sets. And I’ve had interns who’ve worked in the [food garden] and some of the outreach programs.

S1 The primary goal is to teach the public healthy ways to produce food. Both of the gardens we produce fruits and vegetables on are kept to organic standards. There’s really not a lot of chemicals used there. This is implied and taught through organic permaculture and biodynamic techniques, in

56 how we steward the garden. It all starts with soil science; it all starts with healthy mycorrhizal relationships in the soil, and not compacting soil.

Our target is the typical urban backyard, and what can homeowners do to grow healthy food, and to involve family, friends and neighbors, and taking the concept that this is my garden, and a garden in a bigger city. It’s wonderful for parents/grandparents and children. There are so many activities that are just one-way. As we move into a more technological society, we’re robbing ourselves of the primal need of connecting to the earth. So that this is going to feel good is built into our DNA. Horticulture can provide pathways to stress reduction, anxiety reduction, horticultural therapy for a myriad of different afflictions, for everything from PTSD, to working with Alzheimer’s. So our gardens are hardwired to bring their yard to the surrounding community.

We can grow things here in [this region of our state] that you can’t grow elsewhere. We have gardens up and running 365 days in the year, and the vegetable gardens are no different. We partnered up with a seed exchange to do workshops in the garden so that people can save seeds in their own backyard – which is really a lot of fun – and also to be a part of the extended community in [our city].

[our food] Farm is a direct response to what’s going on in [our state] right now, it’s a direct response to the drought. One of our mottos is, our crop is harvesting water, that’s what we’re harvesting. So when 85% of the rainfall goes straight into the gutters and out into the ocean, that’s a huge number that we need to pay attention to. I can’t really do that, I’m not really interested in urban infrastructure. But what I’m interested in is what we can do in our own urban yards, if rain falls and we can catch it, through different techniques…If we can catch rain there and keep it in the ground, that’s a number I can work and build on. I can tell you already, because we’re obviously tracking this in our research, that from October 2015 to March of 2016, on three-quarters of an acre with 9.8” of rain, we harvested 210,114.7 gallons of water. The [food] farm is a water-harvesting farm, and it uses dry land farming techniques. Now we’ve got water, we start thinking about soil building; how to grow happy, healthy soil to grow happy healthy plants. Well, we start thinking about soil as a living, breathing, eating, drinking, life-giving entity onto itself. I can throw seed onto concrete all day and not much is going to happen. I can throw seed on soil and all of a sudden I’ve got this transformation now, this kind of magic that happens. So teaching these soil building techniques is important. But what do we grow now that we’ve got the water, and now we’ve built good soil, we also put in a Mediterranean orchard and some tropical fruit trees, and not ironically, when you think about it, in this super harsh conditions you can produce superfoods: goji berries, pomegranates, macadamia nuts, strawberry guava, pineapple guava, passion fruits – all of these super-fruits. So we get to introduce all these foods that are the superfoods that we can grow on less water than corn. How do you get to grow these super-fruits in an orchard is one of the goals, and then we have a huge three system terrace, which is another way to harvest water. Where the upper levels of the terrace are drier and as water filters down, the lower capture water, and so we plant accordingly; from the things that need less water at the top to the plants that need more water at the bottom. It’s very much a Gaia garden, I work with permaculturists and you can only make them color inside the lines before they go crazy. So we’re starting with a base of three sisters: corn, beans, and gourds, which is a wonderful teaching instrument. Teaching them that this is a tried and true indigenous for everyone. Before there was Walmart and the grocery stores and everything like that, the indigenous people – certainly in our area – grew a monocot, a dicot, and a nitrogen fixer, with the idea of non-competing for space.

57 I teach an organic gardening class that’s 4 hours, 4 times a year, and one of the things we are lucky to have is seed companies that are honing in on breeding superfood types of plants. You know, carrots that are loaded with beta-carotene. The seed companies are kind of niching their own crops. So in these workshops, we do get into the nutritional aspects of the foods. Talks about nutritional content of specific crops

M1 Program related goals – I think that the most significant ones to me are – and at some level they’re all on the edge of advocacy. They’re still research based, of course – we’re part of the university, the ones on the edge of advocacy are the ones most interesting to me both in terms of program development and potential impact on the health of our planet. Like the multi-sector audience piece, you know that’s really intentionally targeting change agents. And the master gardener piece, citizen-wide, is at the other end of that scale, encouraging citizens across the state, you know one of our master gardener advocates might say “do these three things this year. Do these three things in your home.” Our theme this year is water wisely, so one theme about your lawn, one thing about trees, one thing about…just having that distribution system for information is a very interesting model that I’m working on that has all kinds of spider webs. It’s fascinating, and I suppose the farm garden.

Outcomes for teen programs? ---The main thing there is that everything that we do we want to make sure that it provides transferrable skills, whether someone pursues agriculture or horticulture, or not. It’s the work for the common good, and for the community, that overrides the horticulture. Those other things are first and the horticulture is the methods.

L4 Our universal goals are not unique to L4 but are what any botanic garden would have a stake in, which is simply just focusing on the role of plants in our lives as far as food goes, and nourishing us, and everything that goes along with that, as far as the history of that, cultural traditions, reliance on different plants and different communities around the world. The other thing that the L4 has is an international program. So, in addition to having its base camp and presence in [our city], it also operates many different community-based programs around the world, in about three different countries. And in many of those places, like in Peru and Madagascar, we’re working with communities on more sustainable agricultural, agro-forestry; you know some other, different systems that are based on food products. Really looking at the source of production – the source plants – but then how we’ve decided to grow that food and its impact on the plants in that region.

M4 With the culinary arts students – it’s to enhance their potential for employment. Our goal for that is for these students to understand where food comes from, understand how to produce the food, understand how to grow the food, understand what quality food looks like, and how to utilize how to use tropical fruits, vegetables, food and spices. A lot of these kids are applying to go to culinary institute of America, so this is all resume building as well.

For horticulture – the goals is healthy eating. These are mostly kids with Down syndrome, some kids are challenged with autism. The other thing we like about the food-based programming is the sensory aspect to it. We teach the kids how to do relatively simple things, and the therapeutic

58 benefits of these kids being successful at making a salad, or a soup, or whatever, is therapeutically very supportive of kids. So the growing of vegetables and the nutritional benefits they get from it, we tie to a bunch of other cultures around the world. And the other thing we do is kids will frequently take bags of food home with them, so they get the sense of providing for the family; for exceptional kids, this is pretty special too.

The area we’re really concentrating on and is taking off is the fruits and vegetables. We just had a ginger program a couple of weeks ago, so we do the horticultural aspect of growing ginger, for example, and then the culinary students experiment with ginger and make up a variety of recipes and products, and those products actually feed the participants in the classes. So they get paid to make things with gingers with bananas. So it’s integrating our culinary arts students into that program as well. It also helps us to utilize the garden much more completely – so you have a food garden in the Asian garden, you’ve got a food garden in the Caribbean garden, and a food garden in the idea garden, and a food garden in the children’s garden. So you’ve got them all throughout the gardens. It helps us to use them much more as a classroom as well.

L2 Probably the best way to sum [up the goals related to food programs] is to provide opportunity for visitors to learn the relationship between the garden, and their plates, and their bodies. We have a variety of different programs and program formats that help us to achieve that. We have programs for children as young as 3 years old, programs for youth 6-12, we have programs for teenagers, we have classes for adults, and we have exhibits and throughout the different seasons as well. So, in addition to providing opportunities for people to learn about taking care of own vegetable garden, we have classes and activities to learn how to harvest and prepare those plants into a recipe. And so, there are a variety of different formats. We have programs where families enroll their children to come at several points in the season, called our [children’s gardening] Program. We’re celebrating our 60th anniversary of that program this year. So in that program kids are assigned a partner, and the pair work together with several other pairs and with an instructor to tend their own gardens, like in the spring season – late March through June. And that’s part of the [family education] programming. We also have a farmers market that we host, and that begins in early June and runs through Thanksgiving. And so regional farmers are invited to sell produce to our general public. We offer that on Wednesdays, which is our free day, and our farmers market is adjacent to one of our main gates. And then, in addition to the [family education] site, we have free drop-in programming for families every afternoon from April to October, so for 7 months. Beginning in May when we have some produce to harvest, we offer cooking demonstrations every Wednesday, Saturday, and Sunday at 2 and 4pm. So those programs occur on our free visitation day on Wednesday. Those cooking demonstrations model how you can use the plants you grow in your garden, and that you find in your farmers market or store and make something that is delicious and healthy for you. We particularly pay attention to intergenerational teaching and learning, so our classes focus on how children can be involved in the process.

We also have a space that our horticulture division manages called our [home gardening] Center that features a variety of different styles of gardens, including: a cutting garden, but also a vegetable garden. And so we have drop-in sessions in which you can learn different techniques.

We have three divisions here. Our Education Division, which includes adult, children, and public education, as well as our school of professional horticulture training, which is a two-year rigorous

59 program for professional horticulture training, classes, and rotations, including rotations at the edible academy. As well as our Horticulture Division, which takes care of our 250 acres and also takes a leadership role in putting on our exhibitions. And four years ago now we had an exhibition throughout our summer called The [food garden], in which we designed and maintained and had interpretation of about a dozen different styles of edible gardens, as well as cooking demonstrations throughout the summer. And then the Horticulture Division has an outreach program called [community garden outreach program name], and [community garden outreach program name] has a team that works in the community and supports community gardening efforts, as well as school garden efforts. So we collaborate w/ [community garden outreach program] to support school garden efforts. We bring in more of the children’s education expertise, and they bring in more of the outreach in the field, technical assistance and support, and you know navigating permits and various aspects of being in public spaces. Many of the community gardens that they work with, the gardeners themselves grow all sorts of edible plants. And so, as part of their programming they host workshops at the botanical garden for community gardeners, including a class that’s called “Grow More Vegetables.” And then they go out and host workshops at community gardens, and they’ll rotate community gardens, so the community gardeners can see what other community gardeners in the [name of community] are doing, and learn from them as well.

S2 Two in particular come to mind that are most closely related to food. One of them is the children’s program and The [farm].

The [farm], is just less than an acre flower and vegetable farm, and it is part of our Dept of Sanitation compost program. We are one of 7 partners citywide to participate in the compost project, which is funded by the Dept of Sanitation under the bureau of reuse and sustainability, which is their wing focused on waste reduction. A couple of years ago they approached us about installing a farm. Prior to that, our composting work was outreach and education. But this was an opportunity to show people the whole loop, which is teaching people how to compost, getting them to compost, collecting food scraps from local residents, and then actually composting them onsite and using the soil – the permacompost soil that’s produced on the farm itself. By doing that, we are showing the cycle of composting and waste reduction. Just this year we are starting to send school classes out there. They were doing a lot of construction and re-construction last year, and this is the first year we’re touring the school kids through the [farm]. The goal of that tour is to show the whole closed loop cycle of food.

We also send several thousand pounds of produce out to emergency food relief programs (so reducing food hunger). So the [farm] is only a couple years old, so last year was the big year we sent stuff – but the goal of the program is to focus more on the composting and not selling the produce.

We have a lot of interns that work on the [farm], so at the same time just teaching urban farming to various people is a goal. We got over 30 applications for the internship this year, which is great.

The children’s garden is a separate program occupying a separate physical space at the garden, and that program is all about getting kids in non-school hours. So the program runs in the summertime and also on the weekends during the school year. The idea there is to get kids outdoors and get them to experience environmental-based education by doing it, and doing in a hands on setting, very experiential, and then one of our goals is just showing kids where our food

60 comes from. And a lot of times kids will see lettuce in the supermarket, or a tomato, and oftentimes don’t piece together that it came from the ground and that you can actually grow these things. And then in turn, being able to be good stewards of the earth, so just taking care of the space around them. But that one has a really heavy focus on food, and not necessarily healthy eating, but because you’re working in the garden and prepping the produce, healthy eating happens.

We don’t have a certified kitchen and our food prep area is very low-key. We just use basic stuff, like we have a two-burner portable stove. It’s very, very low scale. So I know later on one of the challenges…

We haven’t really [sponsored food-related lectures] so much. This year we’re running a series called “What the Health can I Eat.” And it’s all about healthy living, and they’re hoping to make something in the class from the garden. But we haven’t done that much food based, it’s more planting; showing people how to plant.

S3 The goals are pretty self-evident: 1) to teach people how to grow food. If our whole mission is nurturing the joy of growing, it matters not to us whether you’re growing flowers or food, you’re growing, and that’s what we teach people how to grow. So in this case, we’re teaching people how to grow food. And one of the goals, obviously, is there’s lots of inherent benefits to this, but one of the goals is to increase access to fresh produce in areas of the city that don’t have easy access to fresh produce. So, in the end, decreasing hunger, essentially. So that would be one goal. A second goal would be to increase the consumption of locally grown produce, and then to improve health. So these are some of the funding sources that we have developed in terms of a relevant piece to our community. You have a lot of poverty in [our city], and we have several food deserts, so this is a way to empower people; not just give a man a fish, but teach a man to fish.

S4 Ultimately, as a botanical garden, our goal is to engage people in the discussion of biodiversity and plants, and the role of plants, and human culture on the planet. So at a high level, our goal is showcasing food as one type of plant that humans use. Our food garden is located directly beside a medicinal garden, so we often take people through the food garden, and then talk about our relation to food plants, and then we take them to medicinal garden and talk about relationship to medicines as well. So using food as a connector to engage people in the community, to connect plants in a way that they do daily, by eating, but that they might not always consider. We get a lot of kids who didn’t know that potatoes grew in the ground, or where French fries come from, or even talking about the relation of honeybees to the food system, and pollination, and how that gets their fruits, and those relationships. I think a goal is engaging people in the discussion of ecosystems and biodiversity and food as a key aggregator of something that we can sense, and we can eat, and we can enjoy, and that connects to plants.

L5 To paraphrase the mission of the L5, it’s simply to demonstrate the value of plants to human and ecosystem wellbeing. Within that broad mandate are economic plants, which we use an old definition of economic which would include agriculture. So basically, given that our mission is basically to educate the public about the useful importance of plants, as well as the aesthetic and

61 ecological, there really is nothing we do with plants that’s as expansive and extensive, in terms of human utility, as agriculture. So, we consider it really an essential part of our mission, that your incomplete if you have a broad mandate and you don’t education about agriculture. And then we, like so many cultural institutions, utilize our expertise to service as wide a variety of audience members, visitors and learning styles as possible.

Challenges to achieving food program goals (Q4)

M3 Resources – we don’t have the staff, we don’t have the money for all that we want to do. We don’t have enough time, just the usual’s. And now the fiscal year starts in July, and basically we have been shut down from spending any money, and it’s the high season in the garden so it’s a little hard! But it’s really challenging, because we think we could do so much more if we had more staff.

Basically, resources – I’m sure others would have similar challenges. We’re a poor state, a very poor state.

L1 Well with our offsite programs, some of the challenges are due to systemic problems in the community we’re working in. So I don’t think those are challenges that the American Public Gardens Association can help us with. But in terms of garden operations, some of the challenges sometimes, at least with offsite operations, are on board buy-in. I think another challenge to reaching those goals is looking for funding since the programs are heavily grant-funded, so making sure we have the appropriated funds to run the program. And, I think one of the challenges that we have when we run the [urban farming program] classes at the garden, rather than off-site, is getting people to register for the classes. Getting enough exposure at the garden itself to have those classes. So that sometimes, so that when there’s so many programs being offered it’s hard to get enough exposure to get classes filled.

S6 Some of challenges were when trying to think about looking at more conventional systems, we just don’t have access so where we can actually bring students to see that firsthand, and with their own eyes. So we bring in resources that can try to explain it, but we can’t bring students to see all these things with their own eyes. A piece of that is tied to financial resources and time, so we are limited by our operating budget on what we can offer, and trying to really expand in terms of opportunities and research always requires additional funding. So fundraising and access to conventional ag sites.

L6 The architecture – [name of firm] architecture, they have an office in [our city], but they’re based all over the world. One thing that we’re doing that’s different is that it’s going to be a teaching and learning experience in terms of food, but we want it to be really good looking and beautiful as well.

62 So the hardscape elements, and the layout, and the way we’re going to showcase what’s grown -- It’s not just a farm setting, if you will, it’s really gonna be upscale looking. So that’s a different approach to what other gardens may be doing. Also, we can’t do everything in this little 2-acre lot, so we can’t make a whole corner for everything you want to know about, like composting; not because it’s not important, but because it’s not very attractive to look at. And if we’re having events and dinners in the garden, some of these aspects won’t work as well. We’re not trying to do it all there, but our main goal is to have the exact plants that people should be growing food wise, in a nice spot in this garden that’s looking great, and motivating people to do a food garden.

Our garden will be organic, and I guess that will be sustainable too, we’ll have all those designations. Because how can you have a non-organic food garden and want anybody to come look at it? And that may be a challenge, that’s part of what’s fun about this garden is making that work.

We want plant material in a big enough site that’s nice to look. So we won’t be doing everything just from seed, and slowly you can watch the seeds germinate. We’ll be planting things of an already substantial size, because our goal is to showcase the plants you ought to grow for that season, but not make you watch it start from seed to finish, per se.

L3 I think the only real challenge we have is identifying reliable partnerships that are gonna fit for more than just one season. It’s a tough time right now for a lot of smaller nonprofits, so we form these partnerships with a nonprofit and doesn’t have a Director any more, or they just left and something happened. And, with the city we’ve been working at several sites to do the farmers markets, and unless you really have a partner there who can help communicate with the broader community that this is available and this is happening, there’s only so much marketing we can do. They need to pitch in with us. And I would say, last year we had four main sites, and three of them were outstanding, and one I’d give a C. These are sites for the markets in a food desert. So one was disappointment, but not horrible, and three of them were great.

M2 Interviewee 2 – because I’m doing outreach and working in the community with many, many different types of groups, and whether it be working with different refugee populations, other cultures, and diverse audiences -- there can be challenges associated to that such as language or technique, barriers or understanding. What really I find a challenge is to get data reported back to me. So, if I’m working with a garden project and I know they’re growing over 10,000 pounds of food, how much of that are they eating themselves, how much of that are they giving away to the neighborhood, how much of that are they donating to area food pantries, and are they weighing all of it, and are they reporting it, either back to me or a wider, national or international organization. So, getting that data reported has always been a challenge. A lot of them do very well, a lot of them don’t do it at all. So, that’s a challenge. Logistics can also be a challenge, sometimes, when you’re working with groups in the community and you want to put on a program, and this garden may not even have a building, or a bathroom, or a place to teach. So, logistically, there are sometimes challenges to providing opportunities to folks. You know, certainly we have all that here, but that becomes a transportation issues. And sometimes our general visitors, or people who may want to come to a culinary program, it’s not always the easiest thing to get there if you don’t have the transportation. So those are some of the challenges that I deal with. And being able to visit

63 those 200 plus gardens on a regular basis, or to meet up with someone while they’re in the garden can be tough.

Interviewee 1—another challenge I would add is from our [food education] Program that’s in the summer. We’re actually providing food education and cooking demonstrations for in-need, low- income, mainly local families that have small children. And one of the challenges is going through recruitment and vetting. We really have to partner with a number of local, social service agencies in order to identify appropriate families who would benefit from this program, and follow up with them and make sure they can get here – again, that’s that logistical challenge – and provide the education programming at a time that’s convenient. They usually bring their children with them, so we do separate programming with the whole family, and then bring them together to do tastings, and eat the rainbow – that kind of thing. And you want to involve as much of the family as possible.

S5 The usual trifecta of time, money, and staff. I was hired to create an outreach program, now I’ve done that and it is beyond my scope. It is a challenge to find funding for adequate staffing, and how much staff.

S1 Predators in the arboretum: squirrels, rabbits, peacocks. We’re also a wildlife sanctuary. First thing is you have to protect the food, because there’s nothing more frustrating than getting your seeds, and starting your seeds, and being all excited, and building your soil, and then you plant everything, and the next day you go out and it’s gone, because the squirrels and the peacocks ate it. You go through your integrated pest management of your biological controls, physical controls, cultural and chemical controls – and chemical controls are always last. People need to create more physical barriers in their yards because most people don’t have enough space to grow enough food, so that the first 3 feet of the garden, it’s kind of understood when you’re on a farm that that’s what’s going to get eaten, and that you’re going to harvest the central. In a yard, you don’t have that kind of luxury, so you have to build a big enclosure around their garden for all seasons. And at the [food] Farm we don’t have any enclosures, and this is the first year we’re growing crops. So, we’re using things like Mylar tape and owls and plastic coyotes, and things like that that are hopefully going to thwart the efforts of the critters to eat everything. And so, protection from predators in a public garden. And certainly the biggest consumer that we have in a public garden – we don’t call them a predator – but the biggest consumer we have is the humans. And you know, first year we tried everything, but the peaches are gone when they’re golf ball sized. There’s kind of this train of thought that if it’s in a public garden, I can do whatever I want. But the public garden is here for everybody, it’s not just here for you so if you pick all the flowers for your dining room table, then the rest of the public doesn’t get to…you know, we’re not your personal gardener. We are and we aren’t, you understand what I mean.

And we have a very diverse population, and we have signs everywhere in Mandarin, Spanish, English that say “please, this is for everyone, please don’t harvest.”

Another thing that’s really hard is to keep people on the paths, and out of the planting beds – no compacting soil. We have a very integrated soil system and we don’t create monocultures at all – you know what permaculture is, it’s everything. And then we have meadows that are gorgeous and beautiful, and for some reason the first thing everyone wants to do is run out to the middle of the

64 meadow, put their kids out there and take a picture. If everybody did that, our meadows would last about a day. So we’re really try to teach about mycorrhizal development, what happens when you compact soil. We also go into the spirituality of growing.

M1 I think the challenges are the same for all of our programs. The biggest challenges to all of the work is framing very carefully, framing the invitation to invite people in, to participate and be apart. And that means figuring out through a good audience analysis and really listening very carefully to intended audiences where they are, so that we can design programs that are of number one of interest, and relatable, and #2, meeting people where they are. Whether that’s geographically or in their learning. And those are the challenges that cut across all of this, it’s the key, and probably the hardest work that I do, at that level. It takes a long time to get it, and it never stops, it’s constant, and I do it almost daily in one way or another, across all programs. And since it’s a lot of programs I’ve described, it’s a lot of people. That’s the one thing that’s the biggest challenge for all of the work.

L4 In [our city] there’s a lot of activity regarding agri-science and plant science, and it keeps evolving. There’s a big core area for not only plant science center, but obviously [name of a multinational agri-biotech corporation] is based here, Universities like [name of local university], and innovation communities like [name of innovation hub], and there’s a lot of biotech and plant science energy in [our city]. Of course we also have [name of local non-profit urban ag program], a phenomenal urban agricultural powerhouse. As a botanical garden, which is a like a cultural destination and a place for people to come, [the question] is what’s the best added-value we can bring to that mix, where we’re not necessarily duplicating but having a cumulative effect, having an additive effect. I’m offering that up as a challenge, because there’s this constantly evolving sort of thing. On the one hand, it’s a really exciting town to be here when you’re talking about plant science, especially plant science related to food and to food systems, but it also can be a little bit dizzying, to be perfectly honest. There’s just so much happening and so many things going on that it’s sometimes easy to get lost in the shuffle and really resonate with people.

Also, it’s a matter of how can we as community partners, we need to keep asking ourselves, for instance, we want to send people to [name of local non-profit urban ag program]. For example, a lot of schools might come to us and say, oh, hey, you’re L4, can’t you help us out with some food plants and school garden equipment. And really, [name of local non-profit urban ag program] is the most equipped entity to do that. So our default lately has been: our friends at [name of local non- profit urban ag program] can help you out, but you’re also more than welcome to look at our horticulture programs. So we don’t just want to say, no, we can’t help you. But we also have to look at that realistically, and ask ourselves, what are we equipped to do? We don’t have staff and resources and a bunch of equipment to outfit all the schools that call us. But I can point them to [name of local non-profit urban ag program] and that as community partners and members we have to figure this out. How do we best fit together in ways that are getting people to the right resources at the right time.

65 M4 The infrastructure challenge is that we don’t have a commercial kitchen that we can use for programs. So it would be really nice to have something like what you’ve got in [city where L1 is located], that [name of fruit and vegetable] garden with the kitchen. That would be really fantastic for us. [L1] is one of my favorite gardens since the early ‘80s, the first time I ever went to the botanic garden I was blown away.

One of the things we’re starting to get concerned about as progressively more and more people are eating from the garden is food safety. So we just did training yesterday on food safety, since that’s something that’s certainly a concern for us. I think this Chipotle thing has everyone scared a bit, and you know we see these outbreaks of salmonella on a pretty regular basis on leafy vegetables, strawberries. So now that these programs are growing more quickly, we’ve started to hone in on things like that.

L2 When we added our cooking demonstrations, it was about 4-5 years ago. We put together an “outdoor kitchen”, and so this was added to a facility that had already had programs that were primarily garden education. But, over the years as we harvest dozens of radishes, we’ve found that it’s also important to not only tell them what they could do with the radishes, but to show them. So as part of our programming we began doing more and more cooking with the kids during the program, and gave them ideas and experience that they could then share with their families at home. And again, we work with 3,4, and 5 year-olds, and their parents participate with them, and so they can be learned together, and they can reinforce cooking together at home with fresh fruits and vegetables. And so our cooking demonstrations are a way of doing that with our drop-in audience. And so, we added those, and in our first year we did them every day of the week, and it was a lot of work to prepare for the cooking demonstrations, to prepare the ingredients, and prepare the kitchen, make sure it’s clean, maintain supplies and inventory. And of course, when you cook you make dirty dishes, so cleanup. So we ended up scaling it back slightly to doing it twice a day on our busiest days – Wednesdays, Saturdays and Sundays. And then we added a part-time position that helps to coordinate that effort, not only the day of, but creating a syllabus of recipes, what the talking points are, nutritionally of the garden, technical information on how to grow the plants, fun facts as well, and how the kids can be part of the process. So the challenges would be... staffing is necessary, and of course you have to maintain a facility that is clean and sanitary, and then also just managing expectations of what the demonstration offers. And we include sampling, which is not to be misunderstood as a meal. And then finding that sweet spot of enough information, but not too much information to hold attention of several generations together.

Also, we have a very diverse audience, and so we were given a grant as part of our [famous artist] exhibition last year, and we had an interpreter on our staff for the past two years, which was terrific. So all of our interpretation was adapted and printed onto all of our signs throughout the [famous artist] exhibition in English and Spanish, as well as some of the materials on our website. So, for our cooking demonstrations in 2015, all of our recipes were inspired by [the famous artist], so featured Mexican and Central American plants in our recipes, and so all of our recipes were translated into Spanish, which was great for our Spanish speakers, but we have more than just Spanish speakers as well. So the ability to cross all of those different barriers at the same time.

66 S2 There’s a few – we work with some very young children, and it can be a challenge to grow a garden with very young kids without replacing everything they’ve done. And just the general issues of plants don’t [always] grow, and we have disease and pests like groundhogs that come and eat everything. Since we don’t use any poisons it requires us to be creative and keep them out of your garden. And of course, that’s part of every gardener’s process, but this can be upsetting to young kids; they’ve spent a lot of time and they want to see something grow. So that’s part of the lesson that not everything grows, and that’s part of gardening. But it can be a hard lesson to learn for them.

In terms of infrastructure, we don’t use treated lumber, so the wood rots and you have to replace structures every so often.

We currently want to add more programs, but we don’t have more space. So space is definitely an issue for us.

We had in the farm some issues with the water pipes not functioning properly. So obviously these spaces need access to water, and you realize that when you don’t have water.

The big challenge for me with the children’s garden, and I see this probably coming down the line with the [farm] too, is we don’t have a real kitchen. So it’s a lot of impromptu, using what you have, but kids kind of like that, being creative in the cooking element as well.

S3 Well, you know the same [challenge] you always hear first is funding. And I tell people, you know, we’re not building widgets here. We’re not setting up an assembly line so that you can fund an assembly line and then you just walk away and say “look at all the widgets we’re producing.” This is a human driven activity, and it’s not for sissies, and it takes ongoing education and encouragement on the part of people who know what they’re doing to the people who don’t. Now our model is to teach people how to teach people, so thus the community garden network, thus having community garden leaders, and a critical mass of people in each of those gardens. That are then learning and teaching one another, and sharing all that knowledge. So, funding always the biggest challenge.

I think the other challenges that we had, and this may be unique to us, is that there was a long time that people didn’t understand that this was an outreach program of the botanical garden. So we work really hard to close the loop on that, and so our mantra internally is “One S3”, so it’s a main campus, and an urban campus. It’s not [name of community gardening outreach program], it’s S3! So that’s been a challenge for us operationally, and on several fronts.

[The name of community gardening outreach program] is our outreach program, and ironically that is the only property owned by the S3 outside the main campus.

S4 In [our city] right now, one of our challenges is that there’s a lot of work around the food movement, so we have a bit of competition from other organizations doing food education. But I would actually say that’s a strength though, and I wouldn’t say it’s such a big challenge, sort of raising the tide on the whole movement. So there’s competition from other organizations and market saturation for

67 some of these topics. From an education point of view, it’s having again the staff and the resources to properly animate and tell these stories, so we have some of our docents don’t know a lot, and the challenges of food are complicated. There’s not one definitive answer, you can’t always say that local is better than organic. And I’m pretty comfortable saying I don’t know the answer to that questions, but when you’re trying to train people to talk about the complexities of the food system, I think that can be difficult, because they get overwhelmed, perhaps, by the choices and the complexity and the fact that there’s never really one clear answer. So that’s something we’ve been challenged with.

Another challenge is that some people aren’t necessarily ready for the dialogue. When I gave a tour recently, and we were talking about this being the international year of pulses, and the impact that our current meat supply system is having on sort of environmental sustainability. And the group I gave the tour to, like there was real pushback on that, because in a way the topic was challenging them or felt like somehow this is a critique of the way that they eat. So how do we present these somewhat delicate topics, where we are talking about food, which is not just nutrition but culture and society and people have complex relations to food. So, I think that can be…sometimes I feel that it’s a little bit of a …you know, you’re walking…you don’t necessarily know how people will respond to a topic that you’re bringing up. And I use the meat example as, like, for me, as the most contentious topic to bring up. So for an educator, trying to find ways to engage without making people feel alienated by it, but having people think about it.

And definitely, you know, a lot of the work I’ve done is in food insecurity, and it’s a really, really complex, and really deep, and very intense subject. So, I actually think the garden is in an amazing place to bring that up, because you’re in this amazing setting, but they’re very complex, and you know, they’re very hard subjects to address, and social justice and inequality. So I think it’s a strength for a garden to talk about it, but it’s also a challenge.

L5 Biggest external challenge is the simple lack of familiarity from the public about agriculture. It’s not hard to talk with the public about gardening, because gardening is all around us. Somebody has a tree planted on their block, that’s gardening. So you can really relate that to people very easily; whether they do it or not, they see it around them. People rarely see production agriculture, maybe more in cities people see urban agriculture or community agriculture, but even those are, unfortunately, relatively, not everybody participates in them. So there’s just a significant lack of familiarity of agriculture, the diversity of agriculture that’s out there, and how food gets to your plate. There’s more knowledge about nutrition and processing, and doing more downstream side of agriculture rather than the plant growing side of agriculture. So how do you informally educate when people have such a low degree of familiarity. That creates an inherent challenge.

Internally, the biggest challenge is the lack of expertise about the food system among our own staff, as well as lack of expertise of basic agronomy and agriculture knowledge challenge by the garden.

68 Important food program collaborators (Q5)

M3 Service Systems Associates – the food service agency. We are collaborating right now with both our city and our county open space and the state government, and a private organization, and a non- profit organization to do an agri-tourism brochure. So that’s important to us right now. Another governmental agency is the [local river] Conservancy District – we get our water from their dips – so we collaborate with them, we collaborate with the museum of natural history – we do classes with them. Beekeepers come out and take care of our hives, and they do lectures with us. I guess, if you asked me the most important [collaborators], it’s Service Systems Associates. [Our state] Dept of Ag, we work w/ them and they use us as a national training site. They train on ways to not use pesticides. They come out once a year in the spring to do a formal training here with people from all over the country and people from [our state]. Also, they’ll come out 1-on-1 sometimes and train people how to inspect crops, so we have a real good relationship with the department of Ag.

L1 Private organizations like [name of] a land/real estate developer. Also, our partnership with the community economic development association around WIC; our partnership with [a community health] center; city colleges, without which we wouldn’t have that credit-bearing certificate that we offer. Even [our] county, without which we wouldn’t have real estate programs.

S6 The research partnerships are still within the college but working with faculty and students that are interested in different research on the farm. To date we have had a couple of FAIR grants through the USDA which are ag research and education grants. We’ve looked at some soil issues, and trying to keep resources on the farm. And then in terms of other research outside of the college, we really haven’t expanded there yet, still trying to build a program onsite in hopes of collaborating with other partners outside of the direct college community.

L6 We think chefs are going to be huge, and also having dinners regularly there that are hosted there by different chefs and different themes. Our working title for January is “smart, sumptuous greens”.

We want to reach out to all the folks in the local food growing area, and have them come in and be our demonstrators and teachers. We want people to come in so it’s not all staff, because it will be nice to bring in other people to do it, they’ll be interesting and will take the work off the hort staff to always do all these things.

We hosted a town hall for stakeholders here in [our city’s] metro-area, for people who are doing locally sourced food, an editor of [local city] Magazine, farmers’ market administrators – people who are running these local sourced farmers’ market, and some of the media – our food writers, chefs. Our caterer that we use, that supplies all the food for our restaurants actually did the meal [at the town hall meeting], and everything is locally sourced [our state] products for the meal. That was the first kickoff, and then we’ve had smaller meetings over the last year and a half, but that was our first kind of “bring everybody together in a room,” where we know what we’re doing and we

69 understand what they’re doing, and we plan to continue those gatherings several times a year as well. Because, we want to be a part of a larger group as these things progress, and develop. We’re in a position to be a great host because we have the facilities, and when the garden opens we’ll have this great pavilion to meet in and have these events with the local food people.

No plan for a farmers’ market or farm stand in sight, there’s so many already we don’t see why we need to compete. We might have a weekend workshop on how to make cheese, so maybe the vendor brings and sells their products, but not like a farmers’ market itself. In fact there’s a really good farmers market just down the street, and we don’t want to compete.

L3 [Our city] Housing Authority, and [our city] Health and Human Services. [Our city] Housing Authority was our partner that got everything off the ground. They built a brand new long-term housing development, but it was meant to be kind of a mixed community, so it wasn’t just the cheapest thing you could possibly build, it was a nice mix, and they incorporated a lot of job training elements into it, educational elements to it. They made it look really nice, they put in open space, and with us they created a number of raised bed gardens. And so that’s when we created our curriculum for the urban food initiative. And we taught residents how to grow food at that site, and that was really the big opportunity to get this thing off the ground. And now they’re [the housing authority] are about the do the same thing on the other side of [an interstate] to the west, and we’re gonna replicate what we did on the east.

They raise vegetables there [at the raised bed gardens in the housing authority development] and some of it goes to their own use, but some of it also goes to a culinary academy, where they’re teaching people basic restaurant skills so they can leverage that into jobs. That culinary school might be associated with the [local] University, the open University. This is where we offer a class as well, we actually teach our urban food curriculum at [name of local university].

M2 Our collaborators depend upon the programming and activities that we do. So out in the community, we’re collaborating with a lot of folks, from the organization or group that might be building a garden, or hoping to build a garden, to city government and county government as well. And then there are funders, and folks that are supporters, and then programmatically linking up with like-minded organizations to offer educational amenities and networking opportunities and shared resources as well. And here we collaborate with city and county government, and local chefs, and supporters and donors, and other programmatic makes sense.

S5 The food bank of our county. We are partners in the food donation program. We are a public- private partnership between the Friends of the Park and [our city]. That is why we donate the food.

The Plant it Forward – which encourages all community members who have a garden, or wish to have a garden, to plant extra to donate to the food bank. We’ve grown that program, and are seeking funding to provide staff. We’ve cultivated neighborhood champions to request their

70 neighbors to donate food. People can take produce to the Garden or the Food Bank. The Garden does all the marketing: social media presence, public radio ads, posters.

Other partners: Volunteers – and the garden couldn’t operate without them, [land grand university] and [local] community college, And County Extension, with their statewide master gardener programs.

S1 Paul Stamets has always been an idol of mine. And if you’re a really cool horticulturalist you have an annual subscription of Fungi Perfecti. There’s no such thing as permaculture without community.

Collaborate with land-grant universities.

M1 Partners and change agents. I’ll go back to my previous statements about meeting people where they’re at and doing good audience assessment carefully. Then using that information to develop collaborative partnerships as you go deeper, which would be youth serving nonprofit orgs, [name of state government], [health] Institute at the [local land-grant] University, [state] Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, local chef organizations – Women Who Cook is one of them, local farmers market groups. Group of local co-ops, and we work together a lot, so that’s another sphere that we work in.

L4 Our school partners that we work with are a big part, just because we do have field trips and classes focused around food, and [name of thematic food programming festival], and plants as food. And being able to work with teachers and school districts, are one of the main collaborators to reach kids and families. I would also say our local municipalities as partners. We work with the [local city government] in a variety of ways, with regard to this vacant lot urban vitality initiative. Sure we re- purpose vacant lots as community gardens is one thing, but it’s also working with local neighborhood businesses and grocery stores to make sure that there is fresh fruit and vegetables, and it’s looking at the food desert makeup of [our city] and having this more holistic conversation with our city partners, and saying how can we as a botanical garden help you and the residents of these neighborhoods value fresh, local, sustainable food, have access to fresh, local, sustainable food, and increase their capacity and interest in growing their own food. And we know that we’re only one partner in that big challenge, but we know that we can help if we can be part of that conversation and figure out okay, so is it facilitating workshops at our community gardens throughout the year, giving away some plants after the workshop, what are some things, what are some experiences and resources that we can make available in really intentional ways and in partnership with the city and their engagement strategies with their residents, to get this movement going. So, community based initiatives really, a botanic garden can’t take that on by themselves. It has to do that in true, authentic partnership with those communities and the supporting municipalities of those community hubs, like the churches and the schools, and the community centers. And that seems to work best in this neighborhood I’m mostly thinking about now, the neighborhood we’re investing a lot of time in.

71 As far as professional development programs we did the [name of thematic food programming festival] summit in 2013. And, as a result of that we also have a [name of thematic food programming festival] curriculum for teachers who are interested in the [name of thematic food programming festival] teach-in teacher training. We also have a master gardener program, and one portion of that is about edible gardening. A whole other portion is about landscaping and things that are related to gardening that aren’t necessarily food oriented. But I see that as definitely apart of capacity building and training.

M4 Obviously the school districts are really important to us. Actually one of our other challenges – school districts are our great collaborators but they’re also one of the biggest pains in the butt. So they’re both a benefit and a challenge. Obviously our relationship with [school name] is really key, but the other thing we’re starting to do is work with more producers directly, and also with chefs. So part of our programs, both with the summer camp and also [name of high school at local community college], involves taking kids out into different experiences or bringing guest lectures to work with the kids. So the [name of high school at local community college] kids have been out to a locally sourced re-producer, who talks about humanely harvesting meat so they understand that aspect of the business a lot more. They go and visit organic farms. We’ve had them out to the Ritz Carleton. Ritz has just put in a hydroponic vegetable production site. That culinary community in [our city] is really important to us as a partner.

L2 Support from a few different donors that have helped us to offer the cooking demonstrations. One of our stronger relationships has been Whole Foods Market. In cooking demonstrations, we often have ingredients that we don’t grow.

We develop most of our programming in house. So we’ve had advisors from [local] University, and have done some leadership programming with the Food Institute, and w/ folks at [name of local college], as part of the [university network]. The farmers market, we work with a green market organization to help promote that we have a farmers market.

S2 We haven’t really collaborated with anyone in terms of the food. We haven’t done food lecture programs. But other than the Dept of Sanitation we haven’t done…Our children’s garden is sponsored by [large bank], and have been sponsoring this for 10 years. The [farm] is sponsored by the Dept of Sanitation, and it’s really more of a partnership.

S3 We’ve got dozens of collaborators. But some that stand out particularly around our food-related activities: we have a great relationship with the city, and one of their strategic priorities under their community development block grant is eliminating blight and community gardening. And we are really the resource for that. Not only are they a partial funder, but we have a very good relationship with them in terms of advocating for change in regulations around gardening and growing food in the city. So that’s an important relationship. The county, obviously, through the job development program through the juvenile courts. The United Way is a partial funding for the program, and

72 they’ve been very supportive through the years and increasingly so. And while many programs in our community have been cut, we have had our funding increased. So I think it’s a testament that we’re doing the right things. We have a very strong relationship with the [local] public schools, and actually the parochial schools as well, but the public school system is something that we’re very engaged in. We have a great relationship with the [State] University Extension. They are actually housed on our main campus here and we work closely on programming and many other things. For example, we have an Urban Master Farmer program that we just initiated last fall in collaboration with them. So there’s another educational component. We have a great relationship with a couple of the big hospital systems in town. Obviously with churches. We also have a great relationship with the [Local University]. We have good relationships with local restaurants that are buying our produce, and everything from Boys and Girls Club, to the Y. Another important one I would say is also the county and the city Land Banks. They work with us closely to identify where there are vacant properties that can be taken over for community gardening. So we are not the ones securing the land, we just engage with the people interested in building gardens, and often we will facilitate conversations with the land bank or vice versa – they’ll have people who want us to contact them, and then they want to start a garden but they may not know very well the parameters.

S4 We’re very privileged to be part of the University. We’re located beside the [Name] farm, so this year we’re doing a farm and garden tour, and so we’re collaborating – we buy their produce for some of our events, and we collaborate in many ways with them. So that’s another, separate institution that’s part of [Name] but is a very separate organization. We have a neighborhood association that’s a key collaborator for us, and probably our key collaborator in terms of our food is our “Friends of the Garden”. So they’ve been here at our garden for 40 years, and they have been running for 25 years – and this year is actually the 25th anniversary of our apple festival, and this is an event that was started to sort of raise awareness of the diversity of the different kinds of apples, and this event has grown, it’s like our keystone event, and it’s all volunteer run by our Friends of the Garden. And now, we sell like 50 different varieties of apples and it basically has changed, I believe, the sector in our [Area]. And they harvest weekly the food, that is then donated to the Salvation Army. So they’re key collaborators. Most of the Friends of the Garden are volunteers.

We partner closely with an environmental NFP that delivers food programming to schools, and we collaborate with them on education. Through my work, I do a lot of work with the local food policy council.

The last main collaborator is the [local] School board. So we’re working with them. I’m trying to see – I’ve been involved with them before coming to this garden, but they have started specific school garden raised beds and compost, and specific units that they want schools using and designing, and we’re trying to set ups a demonstration garden here where we can showcase, well here are the great beds that our school board has accrued, compost units that the [local] School board has accrued. So that other groups can come in and see, oh this is how school gardens should be designed. And essentially, they’re designs that can be taken down again, these gardens.

L5 Agricultural Tri-Societies are very important. We’re not currently working with them, but the work we did in previous years have been key. Also, the [Large] Botanic Garden to help educate communities.

73 Then we have programs with NCAT national center for appropriate technology. They’re a farm bill funded organization.

Have worked quite closely with the USDA, USAID and ARS for specific exhibits, like in [name of] exhibit. Able to procure historic wheat used for wheat breeding form Conservation Resource Network.

Future food program collaborators (Q6)

M3 I’d love to collaborate with a community college – they have a culinary program – and I would love to do more with them. The county extension service Home Economics person, we work with her, she does cooking demonstrations in our farm house, because we have a demonstration farm house, with a stove, sink. So if we had more money, I’d love to collaborate more with the county. Also [Name], another city and county agency. Occasionally some of them ask for advice and to share our resources, and we just physically can ‘t get over there and offer advice. So, if we could there’s a lot more collaboration I know we’d be doing. We could go into schools, work with community gardeners, but again, we can’t even keep up with what’s going on the ground. Limitations are specifically related to staffing and resources. Our name is out there, people call us, and we’re real grateful for that, but I’m afraid we can’t always say yes.

S6 We’ve been trying to build relationships with other farmers that are in our area. To look at the farms and the work we do here, but we are supported by the infrastructure of the college. So we identify that and understand that we have a bigger backbone, I guess, in terms of operating within a college. But building relationships with privately held farms in our county and in our area, and keeping positive relationships there and thinking about ways in which we can work together and help support each other in our ventures. I think that’s one area where I’m trying to reach out more. And, in helping to think about other ideas that would help support other farmers in our area while at the same time trying to build some credibility in our program and expand on that.

L6 They have talked about future collaborators, and talking about incorporating hydroponic systems and productions that are real popular.

L3 [Continent Center], is really a host center for refugees. We got some funding to trial a free shuttle bus service to places like that. And this was actually during the winter when we tested it, so the bus will go back and forth every two hours on odd number of hours it’s going from the [Continent Center], to the Garden, and on the even hours it’s going in the opposite direction. And we had over 100 people take advantage of it, and it was extremely moving because the kids had all come here as part of their school programs, but the parents and grandparents didn’t. And they all went through the conservatory, and the whole family started crying because it reminded them of home,

74 and they were just so happy to be here, it was just so cool. So I think that’s the kind of organization we’re going to be looking for, as well as these organizations outside of [our City], so [suburb] and [another suburb], and places like that, we’re going to be forming more relationships there where appropriate and find new ways to do what we do. Either teaching people how to grow their own food or opening food markets or both. A lot of those [outlying communities] don’t need it, they don’t have food deserts, and while there may be individual pockets of people, there’s still a lot of low handing fruit when it comes to major need, so we want to go in that direction first.

M2 [State] University is a land grant university; they have a wonderful extension program. There’s a lot of splinter organizations – non-profits that are associated with food or health that directly affect outcomes. So reaching out to health organizations. Also, the opportunity to reach out to those donor organizations.

Interviewee 1 – I would hope that there are more opportunities for us to collaborate with USDA, NSF we’d love to be working with.

S5 There’s definitely more room to collaborate with businesses. We host project for businesses and they make financial contributions. Would like to collaborate with more funding sources that support programs for low-income populations or community programs.

M1 I’m really working on how to connect with [three large companies]. Those three are all local. I’m working on how to connect with those folks and their goals and objectives, and where there’s alignment. So, I think there’s going to be something there. So I’m working right now on forming partnerships and reaching out to those, I would call them in the world of local food, non-traditional partners, but I think also very important to engage. If we’re going to engage the sustainable farming association, at the same time I want to talk with [A Large Company].

L4 Our science center is opening up a whole new, outdoor agricultural exhibit called “Grow”. So that’s been quite the kind of interesting comments at the garden, though I wouldn’t call it controversy because they’re doing plants. But I think it’s awesome that our science center, another very popular cultural destination in [Our City], are dedicating a whole portion of their outside exhibit space to food and agriculture. So that’s one partnership, they’ve reached out to us in how we can connect. And I see this as additives rather than competitive. Here’s a science center doing a multi-million- dollar exhibit and getting [A Large Company] and some of the other food corporations based here in [Our City] as supporters, so from an educators standpoint, I see it as fantastic. I see it as another opportunity to engage the public on something that should be way more ubiquitous as a topic, so I see it as okay; visitors who are going to go the science center are going to be exposed to this topic, and that might stimulate more people to become more interested, and thus make more connections to coming to places like the [Our City], where they’re not going to see a ginormous crop field like they are at the science center, but they’ll see other approaches to small scale food gardening, other exhibits and other questions and talks about things like perennial polyculture and

75 the future of food, and all those things we’re able to offer up. And, I think, to complement what the Science Center is offering, I think that’s a great opportunity for collaboration in the future. So instead of saying, oh, gosh, let them do that, they’re on their own. I don’t think so, I think it’s better if we can say okay, how can we make this topic even more compelling, so that more people are drawn to it and more people are asking these critical questions about the source of our food and our consumer choices about what we buy at the grocery store and what we grow ourselves. All these questions that we think should be more every day, common, scrutinizing questions we ask ourselves.

[Our City] also benefits from a very thriving food culture.

M4 I think we’ve just started to scratch the surface with this. I see our food-based public programming beginning to take off, and tying that also to “wellness” so really tying locally sourced food, quality food, healthy food, with production permaculture – all those sort of things, really seeing that tied together with this wellness movement… I think the biggest emphasis of our wellness programs is the special needs population, and the people who are interested in wellness.

L2 As part of a new cooking demonstration facility project, we’re going to garden year round and will be creating new programs. One of the audiences we want to increase is our after school partners. So there’s an after school program organization that works with several schools already, so we’ve started to develop relationships with those sort of organizations to help structure the program for participating students.

S2 I’m hoping that we can have more partnerships, local and state. A group of us went up to [nonprofit farm and education center] I hope that we can partner with them and learn different things from us too. As part of their programs, they actually hire culinary educators. In our children’s program, we usually have the same educator teaching environmental education and also teaching cooking, and I thought it would be a neat twist to have an actual chef come in and do something with the kids.

Dept. of Environmental Protection is big, and other water conservation agencies. I just read about rain barrels being installed in several different places, through the USDA actually. Water is here and there’s a lot you can do with water. We get a lot of water in the spring, but there’s usually a small, minor drought in the summer. So, getting some of that curriculum integrated into the food curriculum is very important.

The organization w/ Grow to Learn – they work with school programs, I had a meeting with them last week as well. Just using resources form various groups.

We’re talking about trying to have an afterschool program do gardening, because right now the children’s garden is only on weekends. But even try to collaborate with the school and try to gather the kids at the school and bus them here would be something I’d be curious to look into.

76 And then there is the [name of]farm. It’s a project that was started by the design for public trust, and they started something called [name of] farm, and I believe that the goal of it was to try to gather all the people in [our City] who are doing something food-related and trying to really get a sense of who’s doing what, and try to collaborate with various organizations for fundraising purposes. I don’t know the status of it now, but we were involved with them for a little while. They published a book describing qualitative data on how people felt in a garden. And I believe it was mostly about [our City].

We’re talking about doing one project with [A local] Nursery. We are in an area where one of the first nurseries in the county – [A local] nursery – was founded. In 2017 will be the 280th anniversary of them being founded. We were thinking of doing something with them, like grape varieties and apple trees. We’re trying to put something together, possibly with the historical society.

Would like to connect better with schools, and we do have interns that participate through their high schools.

S3 Engagement with the business community is pretty important. And we do a lot of outreach in terms of presenting to different organizations and different businesses. They are becoming increasingly aware of what we do and the importance of it on many different levels; from a health standpoint, from a community engagement standpoint. So we have groups of employees from different corporations who send down a crew for a day and they work with us to transplant plants in some pots as we grow seedlings for our community garden. So there’s a lot of engagement around that, but I think we could do even more with our funding, a little bit more. We have a market stand, and to get them more involved in actually purchasing local produce.

We are working right now on developing a food hub. So what this means basically is that we’ve been doing community gardening for over 25 years. And we believe that there is an opportunity to elevate the whole enterprise of gardening, in particular around food, for communities and neighborhoods that have precious little ability to generate revenue other ways. So, we’re creating a food hub and engaging with specific, more entrepreneurial type of community gardens, so they’re going to devote a small portion of their gardens for commercial enterprise, if you will. They’re going to grow and we’re going to buy it and resell it. You know, it’s very challenging to engage with the Saturday farmers market as a small, tiny grower. So we are going to provide that conduit to get these vegetables to market. So, nobody is going to get rich doing this, and I don’t know if it’s necessarily a living wage, but it is meaningful money for a lot of communities that don’t have a lot of legal ways to generate money. And I think that it also has the benefit of, you know, when there is a monetary value attached to something. All of a sudden, in many people’s eyes it takes on another layer of significance. So, it’s just a win-win. So we’re hoping through this food hub to really drive that whole importance of local, buying locally grown produce.

We did a study, we visited with other cities, we have been working with the health department, and others to actually get this thing set up. So it will aggregating and distributing, essentially. We’ve got two different vehicles for that. One is a CSA model, so we already had a CSA – a very small one – but we’re increasing that year-by-year as we engage new gardens to buy the produce from, we’ll be increasing the number of CSAs, and we also sell to many restaurants already – I think we’re up to eight restaurants that we sell to. So we’re hoping to increase that as time goes on. And then there’s the whole branding thing that goes with it, and so we’ll get these restaurants to agree to put a little

77 mark next to the dishes that contain locally grown produce that says “[Local] Grown” [on the menu]. And this is reinforcing the whole carbon footprint message. If every family spent x number of dollars on locally grown food, the impact to our local economy would be dramatic.

Part of our challenge is we really need a communications person. We’re so lean and so underfunded at the moment that it’s challenging to find [news about the food hub on the website]. So we do a lot of amazing things but it’s getting that message out there that’s going to be a challenge. So you can try to keep up with it that way, or you can call me.

S4 Next fall we would like to collaborate with our local health agency – specifically around mental health -- and other agencies that are doing work in food, and doing a professional development experience for teachers. So, as part of the University we have the farm, we have our garden here, and there’s another garden associated with the faculty of education so we’re hoping to have a day where teachers can come for professional development, and sort of learn different ways they can engage their students in nature/garden learning. So that’s one thing that we’re trying to operationalize. There’s definitely some movement in trying to get involved in a coalition that’s formed around creating a universal school food program. And this is actually a federal, Canada initiative, trying to see how we can advocate to get school food nutrition sort of increased within schools for lunches, and things like that. So that’s a big project, and probably more related to the work I do for the school policy council, but it’s definitely something I’m advocating for here at the garden. We’re trying to work with groups such as Whole Foods to bring in lunches to provide for kids when low-income schools visit the garden. The last thing is we’re building an outdoor classroom in our food garden, that other groups can use and rent, but I think that will open up the door to other collaborators, and that’s hopefully going to finished in the next two months.

L5 We’re expanding our collaboration with NCAT. In the past they’ve provided agronomic expertise to help us design planting plans so that we can have full season displays of edible crops. So we use them in the past for technical expertise as well as for program delivery. We did a series with them as a primer for new urban farmers. We’re now working with them to provide a training manual for schools, to provide technical expertise with greenhouses. We have a lot of connection with [local] public schools. Several years ago, the board of education mandated that all new schools built must include a school garden or greenhouses.

Important food program outcomes (Q7)

M3 I think it’s the excitement that we’ve been able to generate. Our big event is our cider festival, and people all year long ask when we’re going to do our cider festival, because they want to get our fresh apple cider that we press, or our fresh grape juice that we press. And increasing people’s awareness that we are in the valley, we are adjacent to the [river] and people don’t get it until they come to the farm and they realize how close we are to the river. So I can’t tell you that people are eating healthier because of our farm and what they experience in our restaurant, I don’t know if

78 we’re able to point to that as an outcome yet, but I can say that people really feel a strong connection to the farm. We had a lot of people, even in freezing weather, and they just like the farm. I can’t say if there’s anything higher level than that, but we want them to connect to the land, conserve the land, so we’re working on that, not just the food part of this.

L1 I think some of our collaborations; the outcomes are different for each of our partners. For example, the developer appreciates that space that was once underutilized is now active and engaging residents coming from a mixed housing development. Those are outcomes that he is most interested in. With CEDA, the WIC reduction rates have gone up exponentially in terms of getting their boxes of produce to WIC recipients. So that’s been an outcome that they’ve been really pleased with. And I think some of the other outcomes that our collaborators are hoping for is in exposure, like at [Name] Place rooftops, I think one of the things the food service provider likes is not necessarily the amount of produce that’s coming off the roofs but the amount of exposure they’re getting, which helps them to book shows at their convention space, and it’s a focus for some of their sustainable operations at [Name]. So, each of our partners has a goal in mind that aligns with something that is important to them that we’re able to fill. These outcomes align with our core program goals. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t seek out those collaborations. They have to be mutually beneficial.

S6 Some of the main outcomes have been each year we’re increasing the amount of food the college is producing for itself, and that really ties into the education and interest of students because they are helping make that happen year round. Some of the other outcomes is that we’ve seen students interested in the programs go on to take on their own independent studies, senior projects based on what they’ve learned in their introductory courses on campus and at the farms. And I guess maybe a third level is thinking about students that graduate and go off and they’re either starting their own organic farms or working for different organizations within that same kind of mindset.

L6 The bottom line is we want more people to come to the garden. For this garden to be successful, it will drive attendance in having people want to come more often. And part of that, I think it will drive our membership, because it’ll be something different there every month. So you gotta come more than once a year. So it’s gonna drive all those business lines for us. And I think it’s going to be a great private rental space, because a lot of our revenue does come from after hour’s activities and private rentals. It’s a beautiful place to have a wedding, overlooking the lake with the [Our City] skyline in the background. Even though you’re in the food garden, you may be there because it’s the best place to get married. The takeaway we hope is that it inspires people to go home and want to grow food, even if it’s in a container or a little raised bed, and engage with their children and have fun growing something, and harvest and eating something for yourself. People have lost the art of being able to grow food or understanding that process. People are a little scared to do it.

L3 Institutionally – it’s given us a line of connection with audiences that we didn’t previously know, and that’s been a wonderful, wonderful thing. We are understanding better what we can do that’s of

79 value. Long-term, the benefit of it is we’re trying to figure out ways to engage that, because oftentimes, the community that you’re serving is very fluid and hard to track long-term health benefits. Was there really an acknowledgement of fresh food in their lives, did we make a difference there – we’re sure trying to make a difference there, but it’s tough. A lot of things we’re growing we’re growing because of the requests of individuals that are in the food markets and say, gosh, I wish you would grow this like it was at home, and then, when we do that next season and why don’t you share a recipe with us and putting together kind of local recipe books, and getting those things translated. You know we’re trying to get really down deep into this but how you track that over time and what the benefits are is tricky, because it’s hard to track that population.

M2 [Interviewee 1] First and foremost at the broadest level, our Department, Community Outreach and Education, we’re the ones who are performing our mission, we are. We’re elevating quality of life and connecting the broader community with wonderful experiences.

[Interviewee 2] I see great outcomes from the [Community Gardening] program and the outreach we do. That may mean more food production in our city, in neighborhoods, and food deserts. There is certainly better access to that food by having those neighborhood gardens in every neighborhood, and some large urban agriculture projects – farms, if you will -- that are producing food, which then provides entrepreneurial opportunities to youth and to seniors. There’s a whole nutrition aspect of it, and yeah, when you’re harvesting this locally grown -- know what’s on it, know what’s in it -- food that you grew locally, and most times organically. And for us to be able to provide the education on food preservation, harvesting techniques, freezing, canning, and all of those things, and basically nutrition education. People are making better choices in their diets by having the access to the food and the ease of it being nearby and local, and the cost as well. Finding out that you can grow food and supplement your diet by having that fresh and nutritious produce right there. So we’re finding that children are running home and putting seed packets on their refrigerator instead of their report cards and their pictures from school. That they’re excited, which in turn excites the decision maker in the home, whether that’s mom or whether that’s an aunt or a grandma. They’re [the children] are exciting them that they want to grow carrots and they want to grow to try that. We just see those outcomes, and they’re multifaceted and they go beyond gardening, because the gardens make places safer. And so those opportunities arise so now they can utilize green-space that they couldn’t before because it was a brown-space, or it was a dangerous space. I could go on and on about the benefits of the gardens in the community, but if we’re just talking food, it gives a new meaning to diet, nutrition, health problems and pollution.

[Interviewee 1] One thing I would add is that we are starting a new program this year -- [Teen Training Program]– where we’ll be working with primarily teens from underserved communities. And they’re going to see the whole spectrum from seed to selling. We have our own farmers market here every Wednesday, June through October, and the teens will not only learn basic horticulture and how to grow their own edibles, but they’ll understand prepping, post-harvest, how to market, how to sell, customer service, there’s an entrepreneurial aspect to it so they get the whole process, again from seed to selling. [Teen Training Program] will be conducted at the garden in the initial year, and as we progress in the future, we may be going out work in some of the community gardens that Interviewee 2 has helped to establish, and will be working directly in neighborhoods.

80 S5 The number of people that are impacted and the quality of their experience. The [Food Garden] is open to the public, and our visitation has gone up significantly here. Each person who visits has the opportunity to be impacted, but we don’t measure that.

Whereas with our community gardeners and plant it forward champions, all our participants receive surveys.

We keep building community gardens, and there’s more demand than there are plots. So we keep requesting additional funds to build those community gardens. Decided to take the community garden development on public land.

L4 The extent to which people are growing more of their own food/ or purchasing more of the food that is grown locally. So that’s really about changing behaviors and raising consciousness of what we’re buying and eating. There’s 3 million people in this metro area. So that’s gonna have ripple effects throughout the market.

M4 [Our City] is a really interesting community, and one of the most affluent communities in the world. The flipside is all those people who support mowing those lawns and cleaning those houses and all that kind of stuff. So you have two very different communities. And I think that in the lower [income] communities, you have essentially almost no knowledge of food, and food deserts, and very poor eating habits. So I think this emphasis with children, and those with special needs, and even to some extent the Walker kids, just an understanding what food are available and how delicious it can be, I think that’s going to make a profound impact on their lives. This is going to be hard to believe, but we had a kid, a 10 year-old boy, two years ago in summer camp who had never had an apple. And my other favorite, last year I ask some girl as I was walking by, I asked her what was your favorite thing about camp and the girl said “okra”.

L2 We’re in a major urban setting, [and in] one of the poorest counties in the country if not the state. And so the opportunity to see a plant growing at all is limited in the [Neighborhood] outside of the botanical garden. You might not even have street trees. So just having a facility and a venue, we have the space that’s been allocated to us to grow plants and provide programs to school groups, and families. And even outside an urban setting, families in suburban setting don’t have much of a connection to see where their food comes from, to see what it looks like on a plant. So the opportunity to see that and

S2 People learning by doing something. So being able to really grow and appreciate the space around you by doing something involved.

Having people learn to respect through this methodology, and bringing people here or going them and make a deeper connection, and become more deeply involved.

81 S3 So we believe strongly, that again, how we measure our outcomes or what is important is how well are we teaching people how to grow. That’s what’s important: are people learning how to grow. In the end, we can’t ultimately control these other things, but we’re hoping that, as an additional benefit, we’re modestly lessening hunger and increasing health.

S4 We have one of the oldest food demonstration gardens in the country. People remember coming as children.

That hard to measure impact of education, of kids being transformed by being outside of the classroom.

Our workshops have been relatively successful in terms of coming to some, not all topics. The actual food produced in the food garden has been eaten and consumed by food insecure themselves. That piece of just providing food to people in need.

Food program evaluation methods (Q8)

M3 We evaluate the formal programs, like we have something called [Kids Program] we have our spring break programs out right now at the farm. We have our summer camps. We have the brown bags that I mentioned -- those formal programs, we do surveys at the end of them. That gives more hard data. Out there in the field it’s more anecdotal, we see the kids looking for the strawberries and eating the strawberries, and say “whoa, these are good,” or looking at the artichokes. So there’s formal evaluations for the formal programs, but for the cider festival, we can tell it’s a success b/c we sell every single jug of cider that we produce, and people always want more – and same with grapes. So, it depends on the program, for our informal programs, we don’t do any kind of formal evaluation.

S6 All of the coursework students fill in an evaluation form at the end of every class that students provide feedback and then adjustments will be made based on that feedback. And then within the food production piece of the college, we do participate in what is called the “Real Food challenge,” which is a nation-wide effort to get more local, sustainable food on college campuses. And so within that national movement, the goal is to have 20% of local, sustainable food in the dining services by the year 2020, and we have already surpassed that goal. So that’s one metric that we use to see how we’re doing compared to the national average.

L6 Getting that feedback and having that evaluation will be important.

82 L3 We know how much food we’re giving away; we know how much is purchased using SNAP cards, for example, which was quite significant last year. So there are tangible ways of just looking at volumes. The question is whether or not it led to anything deeper, and that’s a tough one to evaluate, we’d love to know what anybody else is doing out there.

We’ve done surveys after the fact from food classes, and it’s been compiled, but I just haven’t looked at it.

Have not had a formalized assessment of the Veterans program, which is led by [a] Former military who found jobs to be had in food production.

M2 With the [Community Gardening] program, we keep a database at the gardens that is always somewhere in flux, and it’s a challenge as well. Again, I rely on data from the gardeners. So we send out regular surveys to the gardens. A typical community garden will get a survey twice a year, for updates and for a series of about 20 questions on about when you first organize, about how much food did you produce, and people impacted. So we do collect that data as it comes in, but as I’ve said, we certainly don’t have 100% participation. We were able to put that survey online last year, and that has helped tremendously, probably a 50% increase in survey participation. So we’ll do a whole other round of [surveys] this year for evaluation. We’re also encouraging gardeners to report in other fashion, either through the American Community Gardening Association, by putting their garden on a map, by reporting to Plant a Row for the Hungry, which is an organization that tries to tabulate how much food from gardens is donated to food pantries. We also provide a bi-weekly newsletter that goes out to our garden list that provides information, education opportunities, links to the surveys, local events, all of those things. And we get a fairly good response to those surveys as well.

[Interviewee 1] In terms of any of our classes or programs, we have a standard evaluation that we give to all of our participants that they fill out. In terms of a program like [Name Jobs Program], just the fact that they are graduating is a type of evaluation, and we do follow up to see whether they obtain employment in the green industry. [Teen Training Program] will have its own type of evaluation, obviously, and we have other programs as well, and we have evaluation geared toward that program. And we track all our outreach – whether it’s a food presentation or a horticulture presentation – We’re he’s gone and how many people attended the talk. I do the same thing for [Community Garden Program]; gardens visited, people helped, seeds given out, compost available. You know, we track all those things too so we can do that evaluation both for our own knowledge and our annual report and development.

S5 Through surveys and grant reports. One measure is how much produce we’ve donated to food banks. We also ask about the travel time to community garden, the environmental impact of the community gardens.

83 M1 In the academic language of evaluation, you know formative, summative, blah blah blah -- 20% of your budget should be on evaluation. The most important thing for program evaluation, the most important question that I ask, and this is going to be for the policy level, for the master gardener program – I’ve come down to only asking one main question, and that is if people have intent to take an action. And I really just zero in on that and sometimes I only send out three or four questions if it’s something big, but did you learn something new, and how do you intend to use that [knowledge] in your work/personal life, whatever is appropriate for the audience. But that has become my number one question that I ask and really want to know about. It can be very revealing to me whether we’re succeeding in that work. That’s an email to program participants.

We’ve also started using “Pigeonhole” very recently. “Pigeonhole” is a technology that’s live during a conference, and everyone uses their phones. So when you’re in the audience you sign into “Pigeonhole” and you put in a question while the speaker is talking, and everyone who’s in the audience can see all the questions and then you vote the one you want to hear the answer to the most. So it brings that one to the top, so when it’s time for Q&A, we can learn what the audience wants to know more about the most, and it allows us to do an audience assessment at the same, exact time. So it serves as a formative evaluation, if you will, along the way. So at the end of the day, you can look back and see in the different sessions came to the top, but it serves as almost an immediate formative evaluation tool that we can use along the way. We also learn about our audience at that moment: who are you. So it’s this use of real-time technology. That’s in the context of conferences and meetings, but we’re also launching it for distant learning as well. So how can we have someone here, and throughout the state with the Master Gardeners, and experience something in real time and ask questions together.

Also during conferences, we do art on the way, where a graphic artist is drawing throughout the day, and people can participate throughout the way. It’s a different evaluative tool, and we try to use different tools at the time, so people can try to participate in different ways, and learn as much as we can about the audience and what we should do next. It’s real time, it’s right now. Those are the evaluative tools that I’m most using right now.

L4 On a smaller scale, of the programs that we run. To get some pre and post data. I can tell you for instance our teaching training. We circle back with teachers. And we get a sense of to what extent are they continuing food programming and food gardening and part of their school curriculum experience. And on that, it’s interesting working with school systems, because teachers move around a lot. But to us one of the surprises is the residual culture and impact at the school. It’s challenging because often, it’s usually a champion teacher or parent that is driving it as far as school gardening. And once that parent or teach leaves that school, that momentum leaves that school. So that’s one of the challenges as far as evaluation, and seeing the petering out of momentum after we’ve invested in a school and invested in teacher. I don’t imagine that’s a unique challenge just to [Our City], but it’s one of the challenges of working with schools.

[We] do keep data from an evaluation standpoint on participants: parents and kids who come to our edible garden, and have an evaluation survey that we’ve done now for a couple of years with those folks that try to put the finger on the pulse of the extent to which people are either growing their own food or seeking out local, sustainable food on their own. So we have a couple of years of data

84 on that, and that’s more like an ongoing survey of participants who visit that space and do programming in that space. So we do keep data on that, and see some up and down things on awareness of the issues, sensitivity to the issues, and embracing of the issues. As educators, it helps us better understand where to start, as far as what kind of topics to start with them, from do we have to start from ground zero or are they already well-versed on the topic, what more can we do from a programming standpoint with them.

M4 We do evaluate the student’s performance; they receive a certification from us. We do certify school gardens with best practices and offer a $500 reward they can reinvest in their gardens. Evaluate on quality of garden, quality of engagement with volunteers.

L2 We evaluate all of our programs in house, and through some various grants we’ve done we’ve hired outside evaluators to learn more about our success and challenges in programming. We had a grant through the Institute of Museum Studies and conducted surveys online and focus groups, with teachers that participated in programs. Survey of 60 years of programming, working on IRB and marketing team to spread to word. We’re trying to reach back to the 1950s and 1960s. We are working with one of the Faculty from [a] College some of the effects with [an] alumnus ([Prof], did a lot of work on Grow to Learn program) – thesis on what makes a school garden successful in [Our State] and created a diagnostic tool.

S2 We don’t do a ton of evaluation. We do a written survey for the parents of the children’s program.

S3 The formal things we have in place. As part of our formal educational programming with children, we do a lot of pre and post surveys. So we’re trying to measure that and quantify it. The rest of it is really challenging. I find it fascinating, and I came from the for-profit world and I understand this model, but this whole idea of showing impact is challenging when you’re doing mission work. It’s like I said: we’re not making widgets. We can’t show how we sped up the efficiency of the production line. But, we start doing things like weighing the food that is harvested from beds so we have a sense of just how much food, as we increase the number of gardens and keeping track of the number of feet that are producing produce, so what does that incrementally do to the availability of local produce in the market. And then the health impact is a challenging one. We have a new relationship with one of our local hospitals that is going to be buying our produce that is then going to be served to participants in a diabetes program. So they are obviously measuring the health of the participants. And we’re hoping that they’ll be able to share some of that data with us, and that we can use as part of the message that we share: that is really does make a difference. We can anecdotally, I can bore you to death with stories of people whose lives have changed as a result of being engaged with our programs, and their health has changed. The guy from the local housing project who started gardening with us last summer and had issues with diabetes, high blood pressure, and how that’s changed his life, and how he now takes the vegetables to the other people in his housing project, and he’s teaching them how to cook these things with low-salt. So, anecdotally there’s dozens and dozens of stories every month, but it’s hard to quantify that data.

85 S4 The number of students who attend our incredible and edible tour. And trying to estimate the amount of food we produce and is donated to the Salvation Army. I think we can be doing a better job, for example, we will start measuring the amount of water we using in our new irrigation system. Collaborating with the behavioral psychologist, and trying to get a better understanding and willingness of different food choices, and using those psychological metrics to better educate people about more sustainable food choices.

L5 We hire professional museum evaluation consultants for some of our programs. We have not done that for our ag programs, though we are designing a replacement exhibit on plants and culture. We did bring in a company to do focus groups on families, teachers, and older adults w/o kids. Embedded in this evaluation were set forth goals that we can come back and measure.

The standard for every discrete program is evaluation for every activity. So participants receive surveys.

Food program impacts on diversity (Q9a)

M3 We know that the farm is popular with different generations. Again, you see mom’s explaining what clothes are doing on this line, so we know we’re reaching a number of different generations out there. The farm attracts more diverse individuals, but I don’t know if that’s because of the food. We also do old-fashioned crafts and fiber art back there, like one of our big ones is Culcha, and Culcha is an old Spanish tradition, so this group of older Spanish ladies who come. We see Hispanics especially take an interest in this area. Again, we talk about the Acequia tradition – that’s an old Spanish thing, so can I say it’s all because of the food, No. But I can say Hispanics are attracted to the farm as an experience, as a real informal, immersive experience. We don’t have plant labels back there or anything, and we let people graze on the food we grow if they want. I think it’s important to the Hispanics. Also Native Americans love the Navajo Churro sheep – they’re great eating, but we don’t kill ‘em here. But, we do have Navajo Churro Sheep, so Navajos love to come see the Churro sheep.

L1 The one challenge that the garden has is the location and perception of serving primarily an elite audience, and having the programs that we have offsite help us increase our staff diversity. Each year we have 200 participants that are in the program and 90% of the participants are minorities. So it’s important to the program. And then 40% of staff are graduates of the program. And when serving that constituency, it’s important to have a diverse staff.

S6 Yes, I think it definitely brings in a more diverse crowd by having the range of opportunities. We’re able to have hands on workshops, and bring in people who are very interested in learning skills to

86 produce food on their own. Then we’re moving into some of the processing, where people are also interested in producing food on their own, but don’t have the space or the capacity to do that but they still want to work with fresh local foods, so I think we’re reaching another group that way. These are local residents. And then in terms of actually visiting, we are on the coast of [Our State] and it’s a very popular tourist center, so when we get into the height of summer it is advertised that people are welcome to come [to the gardens] and see what’s going on. We don’t have gate fees, or admissions, or anything like that, but we’re essentially always here and people are welcome to stop by, and they do.

L6 I think our visitors are pretty diverse. I just heard we had visitors from over a hundred different countries. We actually at this point are one of the top attractions in [Our City], people want to visit here. [Our City] isn’t known as a place to go on vacation per se, but when people are here, we are one of the top places they want to go and see now. There’s big business in this city, so a lot of people are here on business a lot. We’re a regional destination too, where people will come from 8 hours away in and visit the arboretum. It will also bring people who weren’t coming as often from the food world, perhaps. Maybe chefs would be more interested in visiting. I know that when we had the [Art] exhibit, we had a lot of people come from the art community and visit who may have not before.

M2 [Interviewee 1] Interviewee 2 can speak to how [Community Garden Program] has diversified audience. In terms of other programs and classes, we pride ourselves in offering a wide variety of educational programs that look at food in every aspect. So whether it’s growing edibles, or how they’re cooked in a more healthful way, or Indian cooking, or vegetarian, or gluten-free, our programming has expanded greatly in the last couple of years. We’re offering some really innovative classes. And I personally feel that diversifies the people who are coming here to learn more about it.

[Interviewee 2] [Our Conservatory] is an older conservatory, dating back to 1895, and in the early years it was looked at as a collection of palms, or a collection of ornamental plants. The way this conservatory has grown and evolved into modern times and into trends, and so many different things. We’re known for bringing in leading artists that draw a diverse audience. So getting into the food realm is the same thing. Food is art, and it reaches a certain audience. We always have plants, we always have beauty -- that collection is a background, but what diversifies the audience is the other things we do; by offering tai chi, by offering yoga and culinary programs – all of those diversify our audiences. Marking them affordable really diversifies our audiences, and we do make them affordable. We offer them also to our volunteers and to our staff at a much reduced rate. So there’s diversity right there, in that population of volunteers, but reaching out and offering free opportunities a couple of times of a year where we open the building and provide a community day here at the Conservatory, really opens the doors, so to speak. To both our nearby community and communities far and wide. And going out into the community, you reach a widely diverse audience. In outreach you reach out, and you can choose where you reach. So areas that are underserved, it might be our local neighborhood we want to have better relations with, with our park neighbors. It might be our immigrant-refugee population.

[Interviewee 1] It might be our very large Somali population in [Our City].

87 [Interviewee 2] But it’s also at the same time the suburban neighborhoods, the stroller moms. What you might think are well-to-do communities have some of the busiest food pantries in the area. So there is a need there since the economy dropped some years back, everybody was effected by it, so there’s a new audience out there that are either in a food pantry line, or is out of work, or needs some opportunity for education, whether it’s a hobby or second career. We offer those types of things here.

S5 The food programs, like the education and growing your own food more available, we were on the rising wave on the local food movement, which is quite large here. We recognize that this community is ready, as well as uniting a new generation around the value and self-reliance skill set of the capacity to grow one’s food. We’ve attracted more people through our food programs, and we’ve lowered the prices to participate in community garden. We see the spectrum.

S1

I’ve got people who are 90 years old and moms who bring in their 9 day old babies. And this is specialized, but Lee Adams is a special ed teacher for most of her life, and a local eco artist and grower. And because we have Lee, we’re able to bring in special needs in our horticulture programs. We are able to work with autistic children, the physically disabled PTSD, brain injuries. I would like to work with veterans that have served, because we’re finding that being in the garden really helps. Also the [State] Conservation Corps and the Boys and Girls Club

Working with at-risk group is part of a formal training program. And we’re also teaching leadership development. I believe the Boys and Girls club members do get paid, I’m not sure but I believe they do.

We also are involved with [local University] interns, who get paid. And possibly the at-risk youth training program youth get stipends.

M1 We just added a new staff person last year part-time, …, who is a local food activist who’s from [a large Midwestern City]. So she’s on our staff 20 hours a week as a liaison to a Northwest community. So the program working in this arena has led to our engaging her as an activist and her role as an activist in the community and it’s really had some wonderful impacts in our understanding, and our ability to meet people where they’re at. So that’s one thing. It’s also, …, both of those young adults are former program participants. So, as far as diversity of our staff.

L4 It’s interesting with the diversity of visitor question. I don’t know if it’s had a noticeable impact, the food programming specifically. In our adult education cooking classes, we do try every year that they reflect cultural traditions in the community. So working with the Latino community, attempting to work with contract instructors who are familiar with ethnic cuisine. Connecting with local markets that have different cultural cuisines. So what are the communities in [Our City] who are probably not coming to L4, but would if the programming was relevant and meaningful to them. So I can tell you

88 we reach out with classes like that. But I can’t say these classes have successfully impacted or diversified the visitors coming to the programs.

So the community programs have absolutely diversified the audiences that we’re reaching. Just operating those programs resulted in new funding sources. We’ve had funding sources come to us to say: I like that you’re in this low-income neighborhood in north [Our City], and I like what you’re trying to do there as far as build community capacity for healthy, local lifestyles at the community garden. So I’m going to support you with a 2 or 3-year grant. So just operating that program and doing that community outreach has brought new sources of funding to the [Our City].

S2 We don’t really measure program diversity. Our children’s garden program is a much longer span of time, and we do have a diverse audience. [Our Neighborhood] is very diverse to begin with, as general visitors and program. Food is a very unifying theme; people want to be involved in food – so we find that with those programs is very diverse group of people.

The farm apprenticeship usually attracts young, diverse people – the work is hard and tiring.

S3 Because we believe this is one [Our Garden’s missions], [the urban campus] has definitely transformed the nature of the people that we reach, just by default, and deliberately by building that facility in the heart of the central city. That really has solidified the opportunities to increase the diversity of our audience. We have done a lot of deliberate hiring for people, you know I can’t take my lily white ass – excuse the expression – into a city that is largely black and think that they’re going to look at me as anything but a do-gooder, you know. So the importance of having people from their community sharing that message with them, and we have a couple of really great people on staff doing that work every day, and it’s exciting. So the diversity has definitely increased, and the whole relevance of the [Our Garden] has increased as a result of all this work.

We’ve hired several people, one young man who has come through the juvenile program was a job coach for several years. There have been opportunities, and where we can we engage these young people who share an interest in continuing their involvement. We don’t just say, “There, you’re done, see you later.” The two people in particular that I’m talking about, one of them came out of the urban agriculture certificate program that we had in place with the local community college. They have since ended the program because of their own financial woes. But she came out of that program, and she’s a real dynamo. The state was saying, in order to make this a curriculum-based program, you need to demonstrate that there are jobs, and you know, you’ve got to give it time to create jobs. So we created the urban master farmer program as a replacement for that community college program. And it was booked solid with a waiting list last fall when we did our first session.

S4 And I talk a lot about how plant diversity is intimately connected to cultural diversity. And last year we had a Chinese vegetable garden, and tried to engage people around more ethnic traditional foods.

89 I procure and order food to cater and use a company that employs people from a really poor community of [City]. So when we serve this food, we have a discussion to talk about diversity and inequality.

Food program impacts on fundraising goals (Q9b)

L1 The programs diversify where we’re receiving funding from. We’re receiving money for our urban agricultural programs from the Dept. of Human Services, and we’re looking closely now at different health care grants – so it really broadens the funding base too.

S6 Being able to offer sustainable, agriculture focused classes and sustainable food system courses, and the college being setup as a nonprofit with 501c3 we’re able to apply for grants to help support that program, from private foundations as well as some of the federal grant programs.

L6 If we’re good at what we do, a lot of these seminars and weekend workshops can be sponsored by people or corporations that want to put their name on it.

L3 We [food programs] are not the hardest thing to raise money for, I’ll say that. It’s actually been crazy successful from day one when we started our CSA and we got funding from [A Health Company], which eventually grew to be about $600-$700K to get the entire operation underway with all the equipment and everything else; to, funding that we’ve been able to attract for every component of it: the outreach component, the veterans component, the horticulture therapy component. People really like the program. I think if we could make that the hallmark of what we raise money for then we would rarely get a no. We might not get what we ask for, but we would rarely get a no. The problem is, there’s a lot of other needs.

M2 We in Community Outreach and Education Department are in constant contact with our development department, and they are always really thankful for us sharing not only personal stories of program participants, but also the activities and things that we’re doing in the community. It really plays well for them to be able to represent who we are, who we’re reaching, and what we’re about when they’re speaking to funders and other supporters.

S1 The [Food]Farms were funded by a [Name] Grant, which are usually awarded to science institutes.

90 M1 Yes, food programs absolutely impact funding, and different funding, from different sources then we would have without it. We have generous funding from [Large local Companies]. It’s like adding an arts program to a garden; it opens up a lot of doors and allows you to make more connections

M4 The first thing is you got diverse array of programs, particularly programs that are serving the community in a meaningful way, your donors are going to notice that – whether it’s foundations or individuals. It just makes a much stronger case in our community for support, and that to me is a really fundamental thing, and the food based programming fits into that so well. All you have to do is say we had a kid who was in summer camp and had never had an apple, which is a pretty profound thing. And it’s a great story for the local media. And a lot of the vocational training programs are picked up by the media, like the ginger program can get picked up by the media. And actually a couple of weeks ago they had a whole program on making banana peel ketchup. So those stories are great, and they’re also good for our esprit de corps at the garden itself. It’s not unusual for our gardeners to have a certain passion for growing food as well, and so I think it’s a great way for us to unify staff, and something we’re all interested and passionate about. But also I think for staff it makes them feel – even if you’re in administration doing book-keeping, you still feel like your organization is doing something positive for the community, so it gives you more pride for your organization.

When I was in [Midwestern City] and we started the [Name] Program, and that really became the defining program for that institution.

L2 [The Food Academy] has required a huge fundraising effort. [A] grant has been supportive of our planning stages.

S2 Have not leveraged food programming around fundraising goals. There’s a cost to coming to the children’s garden, , and we’ve created different aged programs that are not supported by [A large Bank]. They’re all fee-based.

S3 As you know, from talking to any community, health is always an issue. My favorite little saying that I’ve coined lately is you know, when I’m talking to the local monstrosity of the health system, and I say to them: you can’t have a clinic on every corner, but we can have a garden in every neighborhood. And that is a platform for a lot of change. And we have realized some additional significant financial support as a result of that. Now, what’s challenging about that equation, like I’ve said from the very beginning, people have this mentality about fundraising, or about donating, where they want to see you become self-sustaining. It’s just this never-ending cycle of, we just had a meeting with a large health company the other day and it was [the company said]: well, we don’t want to be the only one. Well, you’re not the only one, look at all these other partners that are supporting us. But they don’t want to sustain the level of funding that they give, because, in my opinion, a lot of this funding organizations just don’t get it. They just don’t get it.

91 We do get money through Share our Strength, they’re all about children’s hunger, and they do give us a nice chunk of money every fall, and we’re one of four or five programs locally that they support, and we’ve consistently gotten that support on a national level. Outside of that, again, we’re challenged by the fact that we’re a really small team. I do have a new development director who is a dynamo, and if I can keep her engaged long enough to actually do some of these things…You know, [Our City] has actually been identified as a Strike force area, at the federal government level, in terms of poverty and hunger. It’s very much a focus – we’re one of these designated communities. So we have a great relationship with our state senator, our congresswoman, and she is advocating for us at the federal level. We have gotten in the past Department of Education grants, which are significant ones to help support this program, and by significant I mean like $350K over the course of several years. We right now have an application into the USDA for a community food project grant. It’s a $400K request, which would be over four years. But we’re challenged by the fact that we have a very small team, and getting the message out in front of people. The [Name] Foundation has been high on our list because they’ve supported the community in other ways in terms of creative expression.

S4 In terms of fundraising, we’ve been successful in running the [Sustainable School] -- …engaging businesses, and we’ve got good funding from that.

Food program impacts on sustainability operations (Q9c)

M3 Our restaurant has actually received an award for being sustainable based on the produce they get from us. And when they use our produce, and they use it on the menus, they’ll get credit later on in the year when we start giving them credit. They’ll say things come from the farm. And often, for high-level catering events, they save the eggplants for that, then they give us credit, so to speak.

S6 Both of the farms are certified organic by MOFGA, which is the state certifier, so we’re not just producing food, we’re able to build soil, maintain soil fertility, and build a more diverse habitat on the farm, supporting pollinators and other wildlife that are part of the farm ecosystem, so not just straight food production, but thinking of it as building as much diversity as possible for other wildlife.

L3 Our core focus, when it comes to sustainability, is growing food in the most efficient way possible, using the least amount of water. So, down at [our] Farms we’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with no-till agriculture, and looking at how we track carbon sequestration, and use of organic fertilizers and how much water we’re using, and how to conserve the most water, what sort of complementary crops work out. So, we have a lot of things going on down there. trying to figure out as we teach people this, lets make sure it’s water smart and sustainable.

92 S5 The [Food Garden] is considered a living classroom, and we can demonstrate sustainable techniques (cover cropping, and drip irrigation). [our city] has a triple bottom line – environmental, economic, and social. And the [Food Garden] hits all of that; generate funding, teaching sustainable practices, and providing opportunities for anyone to participate.

S1 [Our Food] Farm is a direct response to what’s going on in [our State] right now, it’s a direct response to the drought. One of our mottos is, our crop is harvesting water, that’s what we’re harvesting. So when 85% of the rainfall goes straight into the gutters and out into the ocean, that’s a huge number that we need to pay attention to. I can’t really do that, I’m not really interested in urban infrastructure. But what I’m interested in is what we can do in our own urban yards, if rain falls and we can catch it, through different techniques…If we can catch rain their and keep it in the ground, that’s a number I can work and build on. I can tell you already, because we’re obviously tracking this in our research, from October 2015 to March of 2016, three-quarters of an acre with 9.8” of rain, we harvested 210,114.7 gallons of water. The [Food] farm is a water-harvesting farm, and it uses dry land farming techniques. Now we’ve got water we start thinking about soil-building; how to grow happy, healthy soil to grow happy healthy plants. Well, we start thinking about soil as a living, breathing, eating, drinking, life-giving entity onto itself. I can throw seed onto concrete all day and not much is going to happen. I can throw seed on soil and all of a sudden I’ve got this transformation now, this kind of magic that happens. So teaching these soil building techniques is important. But what do we grow now that we’ve got the water, and now we’ve built good soil, we also put in a Mediterranean orchard with Mediterranean and some tropical fruit trees, and not ironically, when you think about it, in this super harsh conditions you can produce superfoods: goji berries, pomegranates, macadamia nuts, strawberry guava, pineapple guava, passion fruits – all of these super-fruits. So we get to introduce all these foods that are the superfoods, that we can grow on less water than corn. How do you get to grow these super-fruits in an orchard is one of the goals, and then we have a huge three system terrace, which is another way to harvest water. Where the upper levels of the terrace are drier and as water filters down, the lower capture water, and so we plant accordingly; from the things that need less water at the top to the plants that need more water at the bottom. It’s very much a Gaia garden, I work with permaculturists and you can only make them color inside the lines before they go crazy. So we’re starting with a base of three sisters: corn, beans, and gourds, which is a wonderful teaching instrument. Teaching them that this is a tried and true indigenous for everyone. Before there was Walmart and the grocery stores and everything like that, the indigenous people – certainly in our area – grew a monocot, a dicot, and a nitrogen fixer, with the idea of non-competing for space.

L2 The [Family Education] project is going to be the first LEED certified building at the garden. And since we’re working with the next generation, it made sense to build out as sustainably as possible.

S4 Last year we had a drought [here], and did a water-wise workshop for urban farmers and producers, and we got some media coverage for that.

93 We use our food garden to talk about soil, and last year was the international year of soil, and we used that event to talk about soil. There’s another event the Taste of Terroir where worked with a local restaurant, and had a dinner. So you can see sustainability is threaded throughout.

Food program impacts on media coverage (Q9d)

M3 The media, they’re coming out next week when we start flooding our fields with the acequia irrigation.

S6 Do have good media coverage. The college has its own public relations office so to speak, so we get press releases you, but we do have local television channels and newspapers come out to do stores, and I was just interviewed yesterday by the local newspaper on grafting fruit trees, and a few weeks ago we had one of the local TV stations… did a story on our food system work at the farm. So both of those are very positive.

L6 A lot of these local television morning shows have some kind of cooking component. So this garden is designed so you can broadcast live from the garden. We hope to do more of that. We’ll hopefully be one of the go-to places for the media when there’s something food-related that’s a media topic.

L3 Media coverage has been off and on and good. We do a lot of social media on the program. We’ve had follow up news articles on the things that we do. When we do want to really ramp [public relations] we do, and this is just kind of nice. I think the best thing about it is when people find out we’re doing this kind of thing, they’re surprised by it, and they think: “I had no idea that the gardens do that.” And as soon as they ask that question, or make that statement in their head, then they’re open to learning all the things that we do all around the world, and how interesting all that is and cool. And that’s my favorite thing about gardens, we are different than anything cultural include every other cultural. We do everything that everybody else does [regarding the Art Center]. We’re doing a major rehab of the sculpture garden.

M2 Our local media loves us. I have to say they come here quite often, and a lot of times they’ll be covering an upcoming food or cooking class that we have here. In the summer it might be live theatre, but they’re here all the time, and it’s a good working relationship, and I have to give props to our marketing Department on that.

S1 The [Food]farm is the #1 media that we get. Just last week we did a huge article on [Food]Farm, and don’t forget the garden. The Garden for all seasons was also developed in 2010. We do all

94 sorts of media for them – interviews for [several local papers]. Next to dogs and animals, gardening is the number 1 activity or hobby that people pursue in these areas. So this is a gigantic media draw.

L4 So we have these annual themes every year, and in the year 2013 when we all embraced the food theme that whole year was Foodology. So we did special events, we had an all hands on deck with the food issue, and in a year like that where are the themes are resonating, we did get a lot of PR coverage, and media exposure for it.

L2 A year ago we were invited to help Michelle Obama plant her vegetable garden in the back yard of the White House. Our program has been featured on programs like Today Show, and Victory Garden. So all of that has been great attention for us.

S2 We do paid advertisements, but nothing much more than that. And when the farm was opened, the Dept. of Sanitation didn’t want us to go to the media about it. They wanted us to be low-key.

S3 I think definitely [food programs have had a positive impact on media], and we’ve gotten better at telling the story so it’s all about growing. Flowers or food, it doesn’t matter.

S4 For media, our apple festival, we get a lot of media around that. It’s generally between 10-15 thousand people over a two-day event. Last year we had a drought [here] and did a water-wise workshop for urban farmers and producers, and we got some media coverage for that.

L5 Regarding “Amber Waves of Grain” and tied to a statue of Norman Borlaug. During the summer of 2013 we grew a lot of wheat and showed what kind of wheat goes into various products. We were surprised by how much press we got on that, particularly from Kansas and Midwestern states. When we do our visitor surveys, we find that they’re coming from the east or west coast, so it’s rare to get that interest from more rural states.

Influence of food programs on institutional mission/vision (Q10)

M3 Yes, the food programs contribute to our mission and our vision. Our mission is very broad – conservation, education, research and recreation. We do do research in the farm, and that happens to be where a lot of our endangered/native plants are grown. We have this large picnic area back

95 there, and people love to recreate in the farm, and one of our strongest sustainability initiatives is the farm-to-table process that we’ve got going on here. Also, our mission is to be many things to many people because we are a city facility, we have a very diverse community, and I think that our farm does address something. I think some people may not be as comfortable with many of the formal aspects of our botanic garden, but they like the farm; they almost relax – like “I know the farm, I like the farm.” It’s something familiar to many people. We’re a long, lateral garden, and some people say: I can’t believe how many people get back to the farm, they have to walk such a long way, but they do. They do! We did a survey a couple of years ago and a lot of people get back there to the farm, even though it is the back.

L1 The garden’s mission is around the power of plants in healing. And I think we’re broadening the definition of the power of plants, and we’ve seen what plants can do for individuals dealing with things like PTSD and homelessness and other challenges that they have in life, and I think we have a number of board members who are interested in that area and have been really supportive, and we have a number of board members who are slowly coming around on that. It was a little bit of a push initially, but I think they see the value of it now. But we have a really large board. Yes, [this engagement with food programs] is outlined in the strategic plan.

S6 Yes, I do (the food programs influence how our institutions thinks of its vision). I think the farm and garden programs are directly tied to the mission and vision of the college. ….I think the food systems program would be one of a handful of focuses that the college advertises their academics on.

L3 We have a mission, and then we have four core values; we don’t have a mission and a vision. And the mission lives out all four-core values. When we rebranded 8.5 years ago, it shows the core values we’re going to settle on, we’re very disciplined about those four core values.

S5 Yes, food is part of that vision/mission. We’re very much a community garden. Our mission is to improve the lives of people and foster environmental stewardship through horticulture.

The food garden was a garden right on time, and it’s horticulture, and community oriented

M1 Yes, for two reasons. One because of the fruit-breeding program has always been here. The apple research farm is 50 years older. But more so now with the bee and pollination center, and it’s a natural – it fits. So yes, but it’s expanding the mission and vision now. I’ve watched as I’ve advocated for that place of that bee and pollination center, it was not unanimous of where it should be, but I felt very, very strongly of it being part of a display and a way for someone to walk in a see a food system. And as the time evolved, probably through a 2-3 year period, more and more people got on board with that. I think it is, now, become more core, and I think it will continue to

96 do that. And media coverage is assisting that perception. This expanded view is in the strategic plan, but I don’t know if it’s spelled out in the mission.

L4 I think [our food programming] does [influence how our institution thinks of its mission/vision], because it’s interesting, I think back to the American Public Gardens Association conference panel that I was on, and before I went, meeting with [our president], and him reflecting to me the context that he sees this all in, and from his view, it all comes down to sustainable livelihood. In his view, plant conservation is only realistic in the context of to what extent plant conservation is sustainable, because if it doesn’t it’s not going to work. And sustainable livelihoods, by its definition often comes to agriculture, and food, and food choice planning related to food in so many communities. In that sense, the topic of sustainable agriculture and sustainable food systems, and practices and cultural traditions and values related to a more sustainable use of food and what we eat is absolutely part and partial of achieving the mission of plant conservation.

M4 We actually just completed a brand new vision for the next 10 years, and one of the lines in that vision is that we will be a leader in the cultivation and utilization of tropical fruits and vegetables, and we need to modify that a little bit because we don’t want people to think that we’ll be Dole Fruits, or something like that, but the idea is that we want to continue to build our fruit tree collection, our involvement with utilizing tropical fruits and vegetables, and that obviously goes along with our culinary arts programs. Our fruit tree collection is probably one that will ultimately go, in partnership with other organizations, to be a national collection for tropical fruit trees. Our gardens are for the most part tied to cultures and geographic locations around the tropics and subtropics.

L2 Our mission is pretty broad, and this has been our 125th anniversary. Culturally at the garden, there’s been more excitement about food in the last decade. Everyone has to eat and it has become more mainstream, and so it’s exciting to be a part of that community.

S2 Yes, and part of our mission is designing more innovative programs that support environmental stewardship. And having the farm is an amazing demonstration of environmental stewardship. It’s not just about the food produced from it, but also the whole cycle.

I don’t think we’ll change the mission to necessarily talk about food growing, but it’s definitely a huge part of plants. The reason the Farm came to be is that for years we had kids classes come here and everybody always asked if we had tomatoes, peppers and lettuce, and really most of our gardens are aesthetic displays, and a perennial garden, and it’s beautiful of course but not so much food-related. So it was a joint discussion between the Dept. of Sanitation, and I said I’d really like to have a farm, and they said good, we’ll fund it. And it became really intentional to have this farm as a place to bring people to show them where their food is coming from and making a connection to their lives, because sure, you can see roses but if you’re not going to grow roses in your backyard, you’re not going to take that much home with you other than seeing a beautiful place. Food has a

97 totally different impact when people see it growing, and they go home and cook that food and really can connect the dots with where it came from.

S3 Yes, and yes. I have been here 5 1/2 years and one of the primary reasons I took the job was because of the outreach programs. Frankly, I’ve not got an ounce of horticulture in my bones. I’m a business person, and they needed a business person to turn things around from an operational standpoint, and an economic standpoint, and we still have a long way to go. When I looked at the opportunities provided to me, what’s not to love about a beautiful garden. Two, we have big component of the program is the art, and I have some professional background on that, so that spoke to me, but it was the food piece that really clinched it. And to me, it [the food programs] really brings a relevance to the rest of it, that a whole host of people who may not otherwise think that a botanical garden is for them. So our challenge has been, and continues to be, how do we build that bridge for people between food and flowers. And that the platform is – it’s all about growing. It’s really all about growing. So, how did that change things institutionally for us? I remember when I first said we need to build…so the urban agriculture center was finished 3 years ago, so I led the charge on this, and I had several board members who said, why are we doing this? And I’ve said, this is why [it’s all about growing]. And those same people have come to understand why it makes sense, and why it’s critical. Other people have said maybe it should be something we spin off, and I’ve said: absolutely not, absolutely not. It rounds out the relevance, it takes away the stigma of white-bred, deep pocketed, elitist, you know, all the things that botanical gardens carry around as this albatross. Because none of its true, at least not in our community. Maybe it was at one time, but it certainly isn’t now. We struggle, we do, and we don’t charge an admission so there’s nothing elitist about what we do. But, it’s not about keeping people out, it’s about creating value. So it has certainly changed the nature of who we are, this notion of embracing a different way of growing, and as we talk and get more comfortable in our skin about what that looks like and feels like, it has certainly shaped the direction that we are going in.

S4 Yes. The food programs is a node in the network of the garden. Most people would have to walk through the food garden. It influences decisions about who is brought on in terms of staff. It influences the discussion around.

No, not reflected in the mission/vision statement. We have an old mission/vision statement that doesn’t reflect.

L5 Yes, because the mission is to connect people with plants. And food is such an obvious and easy way of connecting people with plants. I think we’ve been doing that, but now we’re taking better stock and more concerted in our efforts to recognize just how powerful that really is. And of course there a lot of rebalancing, so conservation and other things like that are always going to be central to our mission. But it really is hard to get an inner-city [local city] student interested in some tropical plants form the Amazon they’ve never heard of, but you show ‘em where their hamburgers come from, and it’s something that they can grab onto. And that’s very, very important.

98 How the American Public Gardens Association can support food programming at public gardens (Q11)

M3 Well, it comes back to those resources. If there were grant options for just food programming, and we knew what they were, or maybe there are none. Or if there were possibilities for us to apply for grants, because I know we have missed opportunities. You know, we have one education person who shares all the jobs at the aquarium and all the jobs at the botanic garden. We’re funding one person – we have one education coordinator for the aquarium and botanic garden, so, you know we could have our own education person just at the farm, or at the aquarium. So, I think if we had more staff funded by food-related grants that the American Public Gardens Association could help identify and communicate.

We’ve got great ideas, but not enough people to help implement the ideas.

L1 Increase # of sessions on food and food-related programming

The food sessions at American Public Gardens Association seem to be heavily attended at the conferences, and there seems to be a lot of interest in this area, from a broad range of people – from everyone from an academia side to a public outreach side. So increasing the number of sessions on food and food-related programming would be great.

S6 I think that any way that support can be given to public gardens, or incentives may be very helpful. At the root of that would be establishing some packet on resources that administrators of public gardens could look at and get some ideas on how to reach out and get more people involved.

L3 I’m not yet aware of the scale. I don’t know how many organizations that are out there that do this [like the food programming at L3]. If we had a professional section for food-related programming, that might be kind of interesting. I just really love what’s happening with…I mean our CFO just got back from a meeting of CFOs and about 6 weeks ago the chief marketing officers had a meeting in New York. To have all kinds of different groups that have something powerful in common connect with one another, that’s pretty cool.

M2 Right away I think funding, so if they can find pools of money that can help institutions like us further our mission and help provide more outreach. So if there’s funding opportunities, that’s one. Providing curriculum to share and so that institutions can use that curriculum in many different cities, in many different locations, in many different neighborhoods. Any resources that might be out there to help the general cause of food and urban agriculture, and the education thereof would be great. So that’s networking – putting people together to share resources, network with each

99 other and see best practices, and also to pool – if there’s ways – funding opportunities for institutions that are doing programming like this.

M1 I think to provide a forum for the exchange of ideas, and that’s what the new professional section is. When I talk to colleagues at other gardens, people seemed surprised by food systems. I think identifying best practice and models and programs for replication, and help with doing that. It’s one thing to have this conversation on the phone, and I have no idea what other gardens are doing because I’m in this cocoon. I know Atlanta has a great thing going on, I know Windy City in Chicago, but there’s a lot I don’t know about because I’m in this cocoon. So just benchmarking, best practice; so who is it, what’s going on, how can I replicate, could we do something across – like some kind of best practice ideas – or is there a public education campaign that maybe could happen. Elevate best practices.

L4 Most definitely as a forum for describing best practices. Absolutely, and that’s something the American Public Gardens Association does on several fronts, but connecting around shared topics of interest. On this one, there’s at the most basic level, it can be a forum for botanic gardens of all sizes to focus in on this topic, and the resources that they bring to bear, and how they’re re- engaging their public audiences on this topic, how they are intentionally partnering with community organizations so they can make more of an impact in food systems, or discussions. And how, as a member of their communities and a leading cultural resource in their community, I think botanic gardens play a really important role and leading the discussion and serving as a forum for that community to unpack some of these though, complex topics. It’s really interesting in [our City] with [Large Agribusiness] here, as you can imagine it’s a skewed discussion and I think botanic gardens are in many ways these are these trusted 3rd parties who can serve as a forum or convener of discussions, that different perspectives from corporations, to big agriculture, to more innovative small farm systems can come together and unpack an issue and answer questions from the public. I think that role that gardens can play is really significant in our communities.

M4 I’m going to go through the list of thoughts my staff wrote [on how the American Public Gardens Association can support food programming]:

--standards for food safety from harvest to preparation for public gardens setting. I’m worried that we’re getting ahead of ourselves, and these new food programs around the country are accidents waiting to happen.

--Food and ag professional section is a great first step, uniting gardens that provide such programming.

-- the American Public Gardens Association can connect gardens together to unite in a clear message for food-based programs. They can also build relationships between gardens to share materials, ideas and collaborations. Outreach …the benefits of food programs in the community could be a very useful tool to track programs and showing the impact of where these programs are.

100 L2 Just establishing the track is a good thing. [An employee] came back and was really excited to report on the conference, So the opportunity to caucus to learn more about challenges. Even this conversation, it’s important to share the best practices and the different resources, and cross- pollination of ideas.

S2 Talking about evaluation would be helpful, for grants evaluation is huge. I think people struggle with how to best evaluate the audience. I think, being able to differentiate how to work with different ages in a garden or a farm setting, or even just food-related programming. How do you tie food to different age groups, what are the best strategies for that? And connecting to the local community is very important. Our community directly surrounding the garden is Chinese, so we we buy fruits and veggies native to the Chinese culture, and teaching how to cook. That draws the local community and engages w/ them. And it shows how to bring people into the space.

S3 I think that the collective voice is important. Having made a presentation at the American Public Gardens Association meeting several years ago when it was in Columbus. I actually met other people from botanical gardens who were doing this kind of work, and it was very exciting to actually spend time with people who had the same passion for it that we do, and to learn from them. Actually, to turn up the volume underneath that message is really going to help the American Public Gardens Association overall. In the same way it’s helped [our garden], there’s a level of relevance that it affords. And it’s gotta be authentic, you can’t just say, let’s start a food program because it’s going to reach out to the…No, it’s gotta be real and authentic. But for people who are really passionate about it, it absolutely makes sense. What the American Public Gardens Association can do for that is just nurture it, provide the opportunity for sharing of knowledge and celebrating what’s working. You know, advocating at the governmental level. I don’t know if that’s what they do, but I think it’s an important way to really increase the overall performance of gardens in every way and size. If you need help to carry the torch, we are here.

S4 Schools and teachers really need their hands held, it’s almost like people on the ground need extension agents. And I think the American Public Gardens Association can support those services. How can the American Public Gardens Association be an extension and champion of school food programs? Also funding, I don’t know if the American Public Gardens Association does that, but to help smaller/school gardens get in place.

Here’s a tour I could give, talking points, and some curriculum.

Also advocating for policy, and championing alternative food systems.

L5 Obviously #1 is the support for this professional section. I think it’s a very powerful step, and am excited to see who comes to that, see what kind of turnout there is. And we’ve got some plans, so the first meeting of this section will end up being at the Miami Conference and so [several people

101 participated in] a phone call where we went over what we’re going to do at that first meeting and a big part of it is essentially canvassing the group and asking: “What’s everybody interested in, you know”. And your study is going to be a huge part of that, having the results of what people are doing, and what people want to do. I think that’s going to help us mold what’s there. And then we talking about how in the next few years, how we’d like to put on a symposium [at] some point, somewhere, that specifically focuses on agriculture in public gardens. And I’m doing that under the aegis of the American Public Gardens Association I think is really just fantastic. There’s some interest from the world food prize institute of having maybe a side event, maybe one day before or after the annual world food conference in Des Moines that focuses on this issues. Typically give the prize out to development agriculturalists.

I personally would love to connect The World Food Prize Institute with the American Public Gardens Association, and to share support members with the two institutions. To bring together the ag type people with the American Public Gardens Association. Because I think at the end of the day, it’s going to be really exciting when the professionals who spend a lot of their time in the agricultural space, whether that’s agricultural development, or food justice or equality, or good old-fashioned agronomy, or whatever, when the garden professionals can mingle freely with those individuals, I think that’s going to mean a lot. We really need to create those connections, just as we’ve spent the last 60 years creating the connections with conservation biologists and gardens.

Food session ideas at future conferences/interest in joining section (Q12)

M3 Yes, we’d be interested in joining the section. Just like the title says, food and agriculture, and agriculture is more than food. So, I would think getting people to think in a more holistic way. I mean, I’ve seen the way other gardens do the food. It’s different. I mean, maybe it’s more formal, maybe tiered planters, maybe things like that, and there’s a great variety of the way you can present your food programming. But our immersion experience here has really proven popular. Regional and cultural farming expressions – yes, because it’s the culture that really connects. We started this farm over 10 years ago, and it was before even farm-to-table was a buzzword. It’s been interesting to see the emphasis has changed on this. It’s been interesting to see how it was popular in ’04 for different reasons than it is now. It seems to have staying power. You know, the trends change but it’s remained popular. We chose our era after researching with [a] University.

I hope to attend the conference in Miami. I’ve submitted my request a month ago, and I’ll keep my fingers crossed.

L1 Yes, and I think that’s an area we would be interested in supporting because as we’ve found with our programming already, collaborations are important, and if we can get botanic gardens collaborating on programs, the sharing of information will help grow the local food and food programming happening within the botanic gardens.

102 I don’t know about a session topic, but I think having networking time so people who are interested in talking would be good. I think what we run into is that during the sessions, we spend an hour talking, and a ½ hour for questions, and there’s never enough time for people to finish asking their questions, and for people sitting around a table to start talking about ways that we can work together or share information and experiences with people who might be interested in starting a similar program. So I don’t know if the American Public Gardens Association supports those kinds of networking opportunities, but I think that would be valuable…And I think it helps for people to see programs in action. It’s one thing to stand with your PowerPoint and show some of your favorite pictures and talk about it, but for people to have an opportunity to travel and hold a professional section at a botanic garden who is doing extensive food programming would be interesting, because if you have a chance to talk to the program participants, and you see the programs in action, it’s a very different thing than having one person stand up and talk about it.

S6 We would be potentially interested in hearing more, and taking it into consideration. [We] actually just hired a new faculty in the food system programs that won’t start in September.

L6 Would definitely want to join the section and participate. I think what comes next in terms of the American Public Gardens Association, is what do we need on this issue, how can we help partner with each other, best practices, and what’s going on in trends, and maybe we’ll be a resource for gardens maybe thinking about putting in food gardens. As we evolve and continue to learn, maybe we can help folks.

L3 One that I immediately thought was valuable, would be something on how to create partnerships and networks.

M2 Interviewee 2 – I’m definitely interested in what you’re doing. We just held our second annual urban agriculture and community gardens conference in [State], and we had 150 in attendance. The interest is there, and the we’re kind of well-known for what we do here in terms of urban ag and community gardening. The 5-acre community garden demonstration campus that we have on site is a learning opportunity. And then the culinary and horticulture programs that we teach, I think we’re leaders in the field of many organizations.

Interviewee 1 – I’m personally very interested in this section possibility. You know there are always trends going on in public gardening. I can remember when it was ornamental grasses, and then it was children’s gardens, and now a lot of it is about food and nutrition, and connecting the average American where their food comes from.

S5 I’m not familiar with how the American Public Gardens Association fosters the development of these programs or professional sections. So I would prefer to have more background and information on the American Public Gardens Association. In terms of developing food program, I

103 can speak for myself and the director here. And I’ve been able to do what she asked which was to grow a food outreach program, and we’ve done that collaboratively. So I feel there’s a wealth of information we could share at a session topic.

S1 Yes, I’d be very interested, and they need it and it’s about time [that they have food ag prof section]

Would like special topics on organic, sustainable methodology – that would be #1. Also soil building, community involvement, how to create children’s and family activities, weed science, entomology, IPM, building habitats, soil science, and how you can build classes and community around this program. My number one focus, above all, is what does the community need from the garden, and is the garden serving those needs. And 100% if you’ve got some fruit and vegetable program, you immediately get a gigantic chunk of the population. I even have people that attend my classes that live in an apartment, you know, and I take these techniques – these organic, biodynamic, big mediums of soil-building mycorrhizae and I ask: how big is your little wedge out there, outside of your window, you can build it up and you can have a beautiful cutting garden for herbs and fruits and vegetables. It doesn’t matter what the space is, it could be 50 acres, or it could be a 2’x4’ ledge, you know, outside of your window, and we can grow something there, and people need that. ..Gardens are important to people, and if we don’t bring the fulfillment, and the beauty and the wonder and the magic of the garden to the younger generation, how are we going to survive 10, 15, 20, 30 years from now.

L4 I think one [idea] would be equipping us all as botanic gardens and botanic garden educator professionals to facilitate planning discussions around complex, somewhat political charged conversations. I think again that if we’re really being a science based institution and infusing the plant science that we know into the conversation, and facilitating an informed discussion, that embraces multiple perspectives. And I feel some gardens feel more equipped than others. And I think a session focused on that, and providing resources and guidance for how botanic gardens in any community can facilitate those discussions and gather people around the table. How can we facilitate a conversation that’s fact based, that represents multiple different perspectives, that takes into consideration some of the biggest challenges of our day, of our time, as far as food and poverty and health. I think that would be a much valued session topic.

M4 Our staff is really excited about establishing a food and ag section. At least two staff want to be on that committee, if not three.

L2 I think the intersection between the raising of food and the politics of distributing the food warrants more attention. Also, the concern for different agricultural practices, like bioengineering and genetic modification, warrants a closer lens.

104 S2 Design work with a food oriented space. A lot of times in public gardens, the issues of vandalism, how do you keep the vandalism at bay? But I think w/ food programming one of the really important things is connecting it to peoples’ lives.

Career opportunities linked to food programs (Q13)

L1 40% of staff are individuals who have come through training programs. Career opportunities include everything from entry-level positions for graduates of our programs, to people who are in management roles, and even working through the career ladder through organizations that they started with. For example, here we have people start in the packing room, and move up through the ranks to floor supervisor. We’ve seen that not just at [our program], but also … a number of places we’ve seen that progression. We also have 200 program participants in training program offsite

S6 There are no career opportunities that are directly associated, like working for the college, but I think the programs are definitely providing students with skills to find career opportunities within other organizations.

M2 I believe the green industry has not done a good job of showing career opportunity to our young people over the years. And they need to be doing that because there’s such opportunity.

S1 we take interns every year, and that’s part of our guidelines for the [Name] Grant that we bring in at-risk youth, and have them work in the garden, and it’s all about teaching them skills. And let me tell you something – if you have on your resume that you worked at [our Garden], and that you built swales, learned permaculture, build permeable hardscapes – those are huge buzzwords, especially in [our state] – I don’t know about the rest of the world. But if you’ve got that skillset and that knowledge-base, you’re going to get hired. Companies are going to pick you right up, because not everyone knows how to do that.

M1 There is a career track associated with the teen program. It wasn’t in the beginning. A few years back I was at a conference and we were talking about job diversity, and I said I put a job description out and didn’t get many replies, and someone said to me: you grow your own – you grow your own plants. I sort of looked inward and said, oh, yeah, I never thought of that. It was sort of a challenge at the time. And I took it and I said, well yeah! So it’s always there, but it’s not loudly overt.

105 M4 With the culinary arts students – it’s to enhance their potential for employment. Our goal for that is for these students understand where food comes from, understand how to produce the food, understand how to grow the food, understand what quality food looks like, and how to utilize how to use tropical fruits, vegetables, food and spices. A lot of these kids are applying to go to culinary institute of America, so this is all resume building as well.

L2 We have a robust teen program already and so we’re looking to expand that. So we’re looking for programming that’s more enrichment based, so that it will help us to teach and garden. And so, just by virtue of our demographics of our city, the demographics of our volunteer program are largely populated with minorities, boys and girls. As far as career path -- there’s a few ideas on the table for creating apprenticeships, it’s something that’s difficult to learn about – maintaining a school garden or maintaining a farm – in a workshop or a weekend. There’s a lot to learn. So a production program that will foster learning in that way, when someone is also trying to make a living – we’re looking into some ways match that up.

S2 People that are interns here, we don’t have a job for them ready to be offered once they’re done, but I do think it gives them a leg up in a world where a lot of people are interested in farming and environment. That said, our children’s garden program, we have instructors who teach in our children’s garden who do end up staying throughout the rest of the season to teach in other capacities. In terms of diversity, I don’t really know. I don’t know necessarily how to get more diverse people applying to the positions. The intern applicants are very mixed.

Usually if it’s an adult internship we get more Caucasian, but for the Farm internships it’s very mixed.

Future funding (Q14)

L1 Yes, I expect the food program budgets will continue growing because the programs continue to grow. I hope we’ve proven over the years that we can increase our earned revenues from produce sales and workshops and tech assistance and contracts, so I’d like to continue to increase our earned revenues, but in terms of raised revenues we’re opening up opportunities with some of our expanded collaborations, with the health care industries in particular, to open doors to expanded funding sources.

There’s a small part [of our food programs funded] from general operating, but it’s primarily restricted funding. [This restricted funding is] from federal – not state right now, though we have in the past -- foundation, and corporate support.

106 S6 I don’t think [food program budgets] would increase, it will remain steady, but will increase funding opportunities to specific projects. So I think the operating budget will remain steady, but it will make us more attractive to funders to try to bring in a grant funding or private funding for community based farm-specific projects. We currently have some grant funding based on energy efficiency on the farm.

L2 Yes, we’re looking to double our staffing and food programs, so budgets will have to double as well. Our funding is corporate, individual, government and foundations. We also have income through our program fees. Our program fees are a bargain. Our program fees for our school gardens, we go through a process with [State] Dept. of Education and have a contract that reflects reduced rates.

L5 Q: Do you think these relationships w/ agronomy organizations like the World Food Prize could drive funding opportunity?

A: I think on a case by case basis, the answer is definitely yes. People are going to have to work through a lot of issues, but I mean. For example DuPont Pioneers is one of the main funders of the World Food Prize organization, and is also one of the main funders of Des Moines Botanical Garden. So, for that institution, yeah, for sure. In general, I don’t know. We all know that the various gardens that are located near agribusiness and have money to spend, like L4. But I think that there’s also a lot of consternation. Agribusiness is often seen antagonistically to environmental issues. So I think that’s a tough question to unpack. There’s absolutely opportunity there and I think that there’s money to be had. But I think the question is: what constitutes comfort levels for different institutions. That’s not a unique question because [corporation] funds the American Public Gardens Association,I think it’s the same old stuff all over again, and just like the museum world there’s all this pressure from museums to divest from fossil fuel companies and things like that. These are the same kinds of questions.

107 Appendix C – Qualtrics Report

1. What is the name of your garden?

Text ResponseGreen Bay Botanical Garden

Allen Centennial Garden

Powell Gardens

Mountain Top Arboretum

Bartram's Garden

Roosevelt Vanderbilt National Historic Site

Cheyenne Botanic Gardens springs preserve

Tower Hill Botanic Garden

Southern Highlands Reserve

Land & Garden Preserve and Greenrock

Fort Worth Botanic Garden

Jardín Botánico Francisco Javier Clavijero del INECOL

Lincoln Park Zoo

Airlie Gardens

Ambler Arboretum of Temple University

Naples Botanical Garden

Fullerton Arboretum

108 Clark Gardens Botanical Park

Goizueta Gardens at the Atlanta History Center

Sprin Grove Cemetery and Arboretum

Tyler Arboretum

Jardín Botánico Regional de Cadereyta.

UCF Arboretum

Lurie Garden

Children's Community Garden and Student Sustainable Farm

Linden Botanic Garden

Better Homes and Gardens Test Garden

Harold L. Lyon Arboretum

Rogerson Clematis Garden

High Glen Gardens

Denver Botanic Gardens

University of California Botanical Garden at Berkeley

Häagen-Dazs Honey Bee Haven

University of Washington Botanic Gardens

U.S. Botanic Garden

Jensen-Olson Arboretum

Windmill Island Gardens

109 Illinois Central College Horticulture Land Lab

College of the Atlantic

The Scott Arboretum of Swarthmore College

Moore Farms Botanical Garden

CSU Extension

Atlanta Botanical Garden

Desert Botanical Garden

University of Illinois Arboretum

Hidden Lake Gardens

Como Park Zoo and Conservatory

Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center

Jacksonville Arboretum and Gardens

Iowa Arboretum

Bok Tower Gardens

Boerner Botanical Gardens

The Garden of Eatin' at The Gardens on Spring Creek

Garden Literacy (note: not a physical public garden - we are a group dedicated to heightened public engagement with public gardens)

Green Spring Gardens

Toronto Botanical Garden

ABQ BioPark Botanic Garden

110 The Christopher Farm & Gardens

Filoli

Houston Botanic Garden

Longwood Gardens

Delaware Botanic Gardens at Pepper Creek

North Carolina Botanical Garden

Western Colorado Botanical Gardens

Queens Botanica Garden

The gardens Of Matter Park

Applewood

The Kampong, part of NTBG

Hildene, The Lincoln Family Home

Callaway Gardens

Allegheny Arboretum at IUP

Reynolda Gardens of Wake Forest Universityt

Toledo Botanical Garden

Connecticut College Arboretum

Cornell Plantations

Boone County Arboretum

The Botanic Garden at Historic Barns Park

111 Sarah P. Duke Gardens

United States National Arboretum

Humboldt Botanical Garden

The Botanical Garden at Sanibel Moorings

Greater Des Moines Botanical Garden

Memorial University of Newfoundland Botanical Garden

Smithsonian Gardens

Leach Botanical Garden

Indianapolis Museum of Art Tanner Orchard

Vizcaya Museum and Gardens

Fellows Riverside Gardens

Dallas Arboretum

Los Angeles Arboretum & Botanic Garden

Chicago Botanic Garden

Henry Schmieder Arboretum

Franklin Park Conservatory and Botanical Gardens

Huntington Museum of Art

Maymont Foundation

Minnesota Landscape Arboretum

The Frelinghuysen Arboretum

112 Baker Arboretum

The New York Botanical Garden

Greenwood Gardens

StatisticTotal Responses Value106

2. Does your garden currently offer food-related programming? For the purposes of this survey, food-related programming includes the following: growing food, distributing food, teaching about food nutrition or culinary arts, as well as agricultural environmental impacts, agrobiodiversity, and food policy.

Yes 83 80% Answer Response %

In the past, but 4 4% not currently

Not currently, but maybe in 13 13%

the future

No, and no 4 4% plans to do so

Total 104 100%

113 3. How important are the following factors in why your garden has not developed food-related programs to date?

Neither Extremel Not at all Very Important Very Total y Question Importan Unimportan nor Importan Response Importan t t Unimportan t s t Food t programmin g is not 0 2 3 2 2 9 currently relevant to our mission

Limited staff 0 0 1 5 4 10 resources

Limited financial 0 0 2 4 4 10 resources

Limited 3 1 5 1 0 10 space

Other (please 1 0 1 2 2 6 specify)

114 4. Why would you decide to offer food-related programs in the future?

Very Very Total Question Unlikely Undecided Likely Current Unlikely Likely Responses audience 0 0 3 6 2 11 expressing interest

Other (please 1 0 1 0 2 4 specify)

To attract new 0 0 0 4 7 11 audiences

To fulfill an area of 0 0 4 3 4 11 our mission

Other (please specify)staff member making it her particular job to begin a CSA with out reach to youth introduce the public to native plants that are good sources of food

115 5. How important are the following factors in your garden's decision not to offer food-related programming?

Neither Extremel Not at all Very Important Very Total y Question Importan Unimportan nor Importan Response Importan t t Unimportan t s t Food t programmin g is not 0 0 0 1 3 4 relevant to our mission

Limited staff 0 0 0 1 3 4 resources

Limited financial 0 0 1 1 2 4 resources

Limited 0 0 0 0 4 4 space

Other (please 0 0 0 0 1 1 specify)

116 6. How important were the following factors in your garden's decision to discontinue food-related programming?

Neither Extremel Not at all Very Important Very Total y Question Importan Unimportan nor Importan Response Importan t t Unimportan t s t Food t programmin g is not 1 0 1 1 0 3 relevant to our mission

Limited staff 1 0 0 1 1 3 resources

Limited financial 1 0 1 0 1 3 resources

Limited 2 0 0 1 0 3 space

Other (please 1 0 0 0 1 2 specify)

117 7. Please tell us why your institution decided to discontinue its food-related programming?

Text ResponseLoss of sponsorship, more emphasis on pollinators, five summers of Edible Garden programs were successful but felt the need to engage in a new program emphasis on pollinators with a live butterfly exhibit

Vegetable Garden has been closed because of limited financial and staff resources. see Other above.

118 8. Please select all the food-related activities that your Garden offers.

Garden displays 69 83% Answer Response %

Classes 59 71%

Lectures 47 57%

Exhibits 41 49%

Culinary 39 47% programs

Food crop collections or 32 39%

food seed banks

Other (please 27 33% specify)

Training 26 31% programs

Research 18 22%

119 Other (please specify)production for resale

Intensive farming to provide families in need in Southwest Philadelphia with healthy nutritious food options. community gardens garden tours

Produce food for the Cafe

Chocolate confectionary program

Orchard and vineyard

Vegetable markets in food deserts, coffee research globally, veteran's program (job training and rehabilitation), feeding communities curriculum used at local university, teacjing gardens at urban housing development, community garden management, community farm. public tours campus farm

Field day w/taste-testing & recipes

Active with SC Agritourism Association meetings, outreach

Summer Camps, School Outreach

Produce donations to Food Bank

Farmers Markets and Garden Plot programs food distributions technical assistance

High School programming and Farm to School gardens

120 Job training

A collaboration with the Community Garden at the Park harvest vegetables and then donate to charity community garden

Summer Children's Program see arboretum.org

"over the fence" outreach education fruit breeding community garden

121 9. Please select the primary audience for your garden displays.

General Answer Response52 75%% Audience

Families w/ 9 13% children

Young 0 0% professionals

Seniors 0 0%

Teens and 0 0% adolescents

Other (please 8 12% specify)

Total 69 100%

122 Other (please specify)currently, our food research is private

General audiences and college students owners undergraduate/graduate students children college students

Businesses

Specific displays targeted to all of the audiences listed

10. Please select the location or locations of your garden displays.

At the garden 66 96% Answer Response %

At offsite 9 13% location

123 11. Please select the primary audience for your classes (select all that apply).

General Answer Response51 86%% Audience

Families w/ 28 47% children

Young 17 29% professionals

Seniors 18 31%

Teens and 16 27% adolescents

Other (please 13 22% specify)

124 Other (please specichildren fy)

College students we instruct general audiences and graduate level students

University students undergraduate/graduate students

Master Gardeners children college students community gardeners post secondary students

Veterans and Ex-offenders local businesses

All of these

12. Please select the location or locations of your classes.

At the garden 57 97% Answer Response %

At offsite 16 27% location

125 13. Please select the primary audience for your lectures.

General Answer Response39 83%% Audience

Families w/ 2 4% children

Young 2 4% professionals

Seniors 1 2%

Teens and 0 0% adolescents

Other (please 3 6% specify)

Total 47 100%

Other (please specify)University students undergraduate/graduate students

School groups

126 14. Please select the location or locations of your lectures.

At the garden 44 94% Answer Response %

At offsite 12 26% location

15. Please select the primary audience for your research (select all that apply).

General Answer Response13 72%% Audience

Families w/ 0 0% children

Young 0 0% professionals

Seniors 0 0%

Teens and 0 0% adolescents

Other (please 5 28% specify)

Total 18 100%

127 Other (please specify)Cal State Fullerton Students mostly

Families with children and Young Prof. would not let me pick more than one.

University Students and Faculty undergraduate/graduate students

Commercial Fruit Growers

16. Please select the location or locations of your research.

At the garden 15 83% Answer Response %

At offsite 9 50% location

128 17. Please select the primary audience for your food crop collections or food seed banks (select all that apply).

General Answer Response19 59%% Audience

Families w/ 1 3% children

Young 0 0% professionals

Seniors 1 3%

Teens and 1 3% adolescents

Other (please 10 31% specify)

Total 32 100%

129 Other (please specify)private

General audiences and local restaurants volunteers, staff college students

CSA membership and low-income communities in food deserts

University students, faculty,staff, campus restaurants undergraduate/graduate students

Community gardeners scientific community food bank

18. Please select the location or locations of your food crop collections or food seed banks.

At the garden 28 88% Answer Response %

At offsite 11 34% location

130 19. Please select the primary audience for your exhibits.

General Answer Response35 85%% Audience

Families w/ 4 10% children

Young 0 0% professionals

Seniors 0 0%

Teens and 1 2% adolescents

Other (please 1 2% specify)

Total 41 100%

Other (please specify)undergraduate/graduate students

20. Please select the location or locations of your exhibits.

At the garden 40 98% Answer Response %

At offsite 6 15% location

131 21. Please select the primary audience for your training programs (select all that apply).

General Answer Response8 31%% Audience

Families w/ 1 4% children

Young 1 4% professionals

Seniors 0 0%

Teens and 4 15% adolescents

Other (please 12 46% specify)

Total 26 100%

132 Other (please specify)gardeners/farmers all of above

We have several programs for teens with special needs as well as culinary arts students

CSUF Graduate students

University students teachers undergraduate/graduate students un or underemployed; NYC residents

Welfare to Work training

Teens, ex-offenders, adults, and veterans college students

All of these audiences

22. Please select the location or locations of your training programs.

At the garden 23 88% Answer Response %

At offsite 9 35% location

133 23. Please select the primary audience for your culinary programs (select all that apply).

General Answer Response31 79%% Audience

Families w/ 2 5% children

Young 1 3% professionals

Seniors 1 3%

Teens and 2 5% adolescents

Other (please 2 5% specify)

Total 39 100%

Other (please specify)college students undergraduate/graduate students

134 24. Please select the location or locations of your culinary programs.

At the garden 39 100% Answer Response %

At offsite 6 15% location

25. Please select the primary audience for your other ${q://QID52/ChoiceTextEntryValue/9} program (select all that apply).

General Answer Response13 48%% Audience

Families w/ 1 4% children

Young 0 0% professionals

Seniors 0 0%

Teens and 4 15% adolescents

Other (please 9 33% specify)

Total 27 100%

135 Other (please specify)University students

Children

Low-income individuals

Many English as a second language participants. low wageworkers at UNC grantees homeless population fruit growers college students

26. Please select the location or locations of your other ${q://QID52/ChoiceTextEntryValue/9} program.

At the garden 23 85% Answer Response %

At offsite 12 44% location

136 27. How long has your garden offered these food-related activities?

Less than 5 Answer Response25 30%% years

6-10 years 26 31%

11-20 years 15 18%

21+ years 17 20%

Total 83 100%

28. What aspects of food systems do your programs include? Please check all that apply. (Hover over each choice for additional definitions and examples if needed).

Production 79 95% Answer Response %

Consumption 57 69%

Environmental 47 57% impacts

Processing 34 41%

Distribution 28 34%

Food policies 21 25%

137 29. Which production-related subjects do your activities address? Please check all that apply. (Hover over each choice for additional definitions or examples if needed).

Home food Answer Response74 94%% gardening

Soil health and 59 75% fertility

Organic 58 73% agriculture

Integrated Pest 52 66% Managment (IPM)

Permaculture 27 34%

Agrobiodiversity 23 29%

Conventional 14 18% farming

Hydroponics 8 10%

Other (please 8 10% specify)

Aquaponics 7 9%

138 Other (please specify)composting

Design pollination beehives

Community Gardening

GMO issues composting

Pulses

139 30. Do your garden's food-related programs address any of the following challenges or topics related to local, regional, and global food systems? Please check all that apply.

AnswerOrganic vs non- Response % organic 41 49%

production

Food systems' impact on the 38 46% environment

Food security 38 46%

Agrobiodiversity 25 30%

Feeding a growing 22 27% population

Our food systems education does 18 22% not include these topics

Biotechnology 9 11%

Other (please 4 5% specify)

140 Other (please specify)local food system support bee pollinator decline

Food deserts

Vavilov

31. Does your garden use food or agriculture related curriculum in its education programs?

Yes 70 85% Answer Response %

No 12 15%

Total 82 100%

32. Would you be willing to share this curriculum with the American Public Gardens Association?

AnswerYes. Please Response % contact me for 51 75% more information

No 17 25%

Total 68 100%

141 33. Thank you! Please provide your name and email address so we can follow-up.

34. Please describe the most important goals for your food-related programming.

Text ResponseTo meet the needs of our community. Do you want to space between separate text responses?

To teach people where their food comes from improving health, enjoyment

Bartram's Garden works in partnership with UPenn's Urban Nutrition Initiative, the Pennsylvania Horticultural Society, the Philadelphia Orchard Project, and the City of Philadelphia to host the community farm which supports the growth, production, and consumption of healthy produce for families in need in Southwest Philadelphia. UPenn's UNI runs the farm, engaging 25 high school interns in a training program through which they are empowered to address food justice issues in the community.

To communicate our history, the Roosevelt philosophy of conservation, and self support, to network, to educate interested school educators and to encourage the public to 'grow your own' today. educating people to grow their own food educating the general public about where food comes from (plants), how they can grow it themselves and its importance.

The focus is on food production, supporting the local agricultural industry and supporting farm to table, introducing kids to growing, cooking and eating healthy food, and of course pollinators and the importance of their role.

Right now it is private but we have to determine how we will use this in the future once that part of the operation becomes public.

Audience understanding of home gardening and its benefits to a healthy diet

The importance of school gardens Food security The food processing

Connecting people to nature

142 All of the produce from our food garden is donated to local food pantries, so the topics of food security and urban/intensive agriculture are integrated into our classes and programs in that garden.

Healthy eating, vocational training, basic understanding of where food comes from for children, building awareness of tropical crops, cultivation and utilization

Education, Social Enterprise, Food Security, Locally Grown,

Informal setting using area Master Gardeners.

-Raising awareness of how to grow your own food -learning from historical practices - how Civil-War era families survived off their gardens and animals

Enjoyment and education. The one event, "Chocolate in the Chapel" brings confectionaries into the historic setting of Norman Chapel for an afternoon of chocolate. Plant tours include information about edible plants in the landscape. Our food programs are more on the periphory of your focus on foods.

Garden to grocer to dinner - the source of food and healthy eating. Our audience is PRIMARILY school children, with some hands on learning. We would like to improve and expand our garden to address some of th eother topics you highlighted, but have found it difficult to fund. What is the right message to communicate?

Educate people about the value of conventional crops, cultivate them in such a way that they do not damage the environment and reflect on the need to conserve native crops and their wild relatives.

To develop curriculum related to our production garden, targeting different user groups. Do more community outreach and advising of school gardens and local or municipal community garden groups. Expand production and education activities.

Develop excitement and participation in urban agriculture. showing children that growing fruit and vegetables is easy and fun, such that they will hopefully garden as they grow older AND to teach undergraduate students techniques in organic farming that allows them to feed a local community for 12 months of the year, using low and high tunnels.

143 Educating the next generation of farmers

To make home gardeners aware of how to grow vegetables and herbs: good choices for large vs. small garden spaces, container gardening, selection of disease resistant varieties, careful watering to reduce spread of diseases, ornamental value of vegetables and herbs.

This is not a major emphasis for our garden, but food and food systems interplay with our focus on Hawaiian Ethnobotany as well as plant and biodiversity conservation. Educating the public about these subjects are among our most important goals.

We have a small vegetable garden of 10 raised beds to provide fresh produce for the owners of the property. It is not a focal point of the gardens, or a high priority in programming.

Sustainable food production addressing diverse audience needs as part of an emphasis on social responsibility. Specific outcomes are independence, economic development, health, education and greater understanding of overall nutrition.

We educate our audiences on the geographic diversity of food origins.

1. Increase visitor awareness of the importance of bee pollinators to the production of their food. 2. Teach visitors what they can do in home food gardens to conserve bee pollinators.

We manage the UW Student Farm at one of our sites and at two dorms. Our goal is to provide students with an understanding of food production, ecology, and policy. We offer 30 CSAs to faculty, staff, and students, provide food to some campus restaurants (not cafeterias). We are developing a food minor for UW students. We are also developing a children's program, that will debut this year. We offer classes for homeowners on a variety of food topics.

We aim to connect people to the plants and growing practices that produce their food, educate people about healthy plant-based foods, and teach people about the importance of plants in their every day lives. our food production goes to the local food bank/homeless shelter and youth programs

144 Trialing new varieties for production value.

Our food-related programming instills an understanding of sustainable food production that provides nourishment not only for ourselves, but also for communities and the environment.

Appeal to a younger crowd; have new and dfferenct programming.

Connecting people and agricultural crops both as food sources and garden subjects. Educating the public on food origins, cultivation and nutrition. Promoting SC's burgeoning agritourism industry. In 2017 initiate an heirloom and landrace collection of Southern crops, with the goal of achieving accreditation as a NPC collection.

Building a strong food system on a local level to build economic growth.

To connect people with plants via the food they eat.

Facilitating community connectedness, fair wages for farm workers, ending food deserts, celebrating existing agricultural roots.

At this early stage of the institution and the collections, the goal is to remind visitors of the fact that they are connected to the earth. We are promoting the many uses of plants by people, including food.

Food nutrition, growing of food, food for food pantries

Connecting people with plants to understand the importance of plants to our health and survival

Classes are held with the school age children to learn where and how their food is grown. We have a program called stir fried plants. We also have done adult education classes on preserving food.

Providing pertinent education to foster success in growing one's own food which, in turn, fosters self-reliance, increases food security and empowers both new and seasoned gardeners. It expands awareness of possibilities of how fresh produce may be used and expands knowledge of nutrition.

For the display gardens and related programs, helping our audience be successful growing their own food. For our Farmers Markets, helping customers find healthy,

145 fresh, local food at affordable prices.

Teaching people where their food comes from, its impact on them and on our environment, and how they can grow their own. heighten awareness about agriculture (we include livestock as well as crops) by demonstrating through an immersion exhibit how crops are grown and what food looks as it grows

Our primary mission is to grow vegetables and fruit so that all employees at UNC Chapel Hill have access to fresh, sustainably grown produce through the shared efforts of staff, students, faculty and local residents

Education! Learn by doing.

To connect people with the skills to grow their own gardens and highlight Applewood's farming history and seasonal eating of foods produced at the estate. Also, the nutritional benefits.

Celebrating the legacy of Dr David Fairchild

Sustainability and education

Teaching the general public about growing food crops in the home landscape, concentrating on the most sustainable practices. (We will also be offering Landscape for Life this spring and fall.)

1. Nurturing the joy of growing. 2. Empowering those of limited means to grow their own food, (at the same time addressing the issue of food deserts). 3. Educating and advocating for the support of locally grown produce. 4. Giving a hands-on experience that advances an appreciation for nutritious, fresh produce and, through one of our programs, gives youth a marketable skill. raise awareness regarding the importance of plants, pollinators and natural systems in supporting agriculture

Connecting people to the plants that provide the food, addressing climate change and its potential impact on food crops, developing exhibits and activities that connect people to food plants and the cultural connections associated with food plants.

146 Teaching homeowners how to successfully grow a vegetable garden for their own home grown produce needs.

Our present goal is to continue collaborating with the Traverse City Community Garden, one of the other entities at the Historic Barns Park. We are bringing in Ellen Ekert Ogden (author of books on designing vegetable gardens, growing those gardens and preparing the food grown) as a part of this collaboration. Ellen will work with seminar attendees to design a special garden within the Community Garden's area, which will be planted, maintained and harvested by volunteers from both the Community Garden and the Botanic Garden. All food grown in that specific garden will be donated to local food kitchens. Signage, follow-up classes, tours, etc. will provide additional information to park visitors.

Reintroducing people to food and growing food. We are all so removed from the production of our food that it does not occur to people that food could be tastier, healthier, more varied if they grew their own. From children to adults, people are re- discovering the magic of a home grown tomato, how good a freshly picked zucchini tastes and exploring new vegetables like kohlrabi. we encourage people to eat a rainbow, grow food, and learn to prepare it in tasty ways.

Access to healthy food in urban areas.

Provide fresh, organic produce for homeless population in Humboldt County. Train welfare to work participants how to grow fresh, organic produce.

Connecting people to the plant world. Supporting gardeners to help them be successful and knowledgable.

Education and research which emphasizes local, sustainable, environmentally friendly (pesticide free) practices

Tying the history of our food and agriculture to our garden exhibit at the National Museum of American History

Showing the general public including kids how to grow their own fruits and vegetables so they might have an interest in starting a home garden. We also use our bee hives to discuss the topic of pollination and why providing habitat to pollinators is so important to our food supply.

147 Availability of healthy food to underserved, ability of anyone to grow food, tie-in with Vizcaya's agricultural past, tie-in to South Florida's agricultural past, local stewardship of limited resources

Exposure of children to growing, harvesting and preparing their own food using organic and sustainable methods. General culinary classes focus on the diversity of food, the local food movement, sustainable food processes.

To educate the public on sustainable growing systems that build soil, habitat, and health!

The Chicago Botanic Garden’s urban agriculture education and jobs-training initiative to help build a local food system, healthier communities, and a greener economy.

Mission: elevate quality of life and connect the community through educational, cultural and social experiences. Connect the general public to the art and science of growing one's own food and using it in a sustainable and nutritious manner.

Demonstrating to families and all of Maymont's guests that growing food can easily be done on a small scale, Using containers, square foot, raised bed and vertical gardening techniques we show how it is done, explain "over the fence" how to do it and provide tastes of the organically grown produce for them to experience the flavors of fresh produce. Maymont works with local Master Gardener groups on this educational/demonstration project. Virginia Tech educational materials are shared with guests interested in starting their own small garden plot or container garden.

Develop hardy cultivars for USDA zone 4 with outstanding texture and flavor. Teach K-6 classes where food comes from. Promote locally grown food. Demonstrate innovative growing methods for fruits, vegetables and herbs. Teach edible landscaping.

NYBG Mission: The New York Botanical Garden is an advocate for the plant kingdom. The Garden pursues its mission through its role as a museum of living plant collections arranged in gardens and landscapes across its National Historic Landmark site; through its comprehensive education programs in horticulture and plant science; and through the wide-ranging research programs of the International Plant Science Center. Food-related programming across our Horticulture, Education, and Science divisions is robust, including research efforts throughout the world across many disciplines, educational programs for all ages and in a spectrum of formats, and through inspiring

148 displays and exhibits.

Education to create a just and sustainable food system in our local and global communities

The enjoyment and health benefits of growing and preparing your own food.

StatisticTotal Responses Value76

35. How important are the following resources in achieving these goals?

Neither Not at all Very Important Very Extremely Total Question Important Unimportant nor Important Important Responses Additional Unimportant staff 1 1 12 31 31 76 resources

Financial 1 2 8 34 31 76 resources

Garden 4 3 14 33 22 76 space

Other (please 4 0 5 14 12 35 specify)

149 Other (please specify)Partnerships with lead organizations distribution partner(s) for produce

Partners mission of the expanded organization

Venders

Defined concepts and strategies. marketing support marketing, to gain the needed audience

Always looking for more partners marketing community support embracing as part of mission

Outside partnerships

Marketing in the community

Our volunteers-primarily students, staff, and local residents

Collaboration with local high school

Local government support

Evaluation of program goals

This garden will be planted and maintained by all volunteers - materials (seeds, compost, etc.) will all be donated.

150 A broader understanding of 'display garden' partnerships across the community

Additional classroom space

Policies set in place to support the operation

Products

Master Gardeners/volunteers to partner with

Marketing for programs expertise and community connections

36. Please tell us how many staff your garden employs for food-related programming?

Average Standard # Answer Min Value Max Value Full-time Value Deviation 1 year-round 0.00 22.00 2.02 3.38 staff

Part-time 2 year-round 0.00 12.00 1.03 1.80 staff

Seasonal 3 0.00 150.00 4.16 18.94 staff

151 37. What is the annual budget for your garden's food-related programming?

Less than #1 Answer Response29 39%% $2,000

$2,001 - 2 20 27% $15,000

$15,001 - 3 6 8% $35,000

$35,000 - 4 6 8% $75,000

$75,000 or 5 14 19% more

Total 75 100%

38. How has food system programming impacted the diversity of your garden's visitors or program participants?

Increased Answer Response42 55%% diversity

Reduced 0 0% diversity

No impact 6 8%

Don't know 29 38%

Total 77 100%

152 39. What are the goals of your food-related programs? Please check all that apply.

AnswerWorkforce Response % development (skills training 2 3% programs for underserved audiences)

Community 18 23% outreach

Youth leadership 2 3% education

Adult continuing 9 12% educcuation

Improving food 5 6% access

Exhibit-based general visitor 9 12%

education

Food crop 2 3% research

Other (please 30 39% specify)

Total 77 100%

153 Other (please specify)most of the above can only click one answer

(unable to check more than one...), community outreach, adult ed, exhibit general visitor ed

All of the above and it wouldn't let me check them! right now, personal consumption youth education

The first 5

All of the above. Survey would not let me check "all that apply"

Program diversity and use of a historically significant building space this box does not permit more than one button, but our three goals are community outreach, youth leadership education and exhibit based general visitor education.

Community outreach, Youth leadership, adult cont. ed., improving food access. print and digital educational opportunities owner satisfaction

All of the above. Wouldn't let me chheck more than one. community outreach, adult continuing education, exhibit-based general visitor education

This question only allows one answer. We focus on teaching young adults about food.

Can only select one, but want to mark all but food access and crop research

System only permitted one check to interest visitors in plants and nature

154 community outreach an adult continuing education

Adult and children education, Exhibit-based general visitor, improving food access

Only one check is allowed. All listed goals are included in programming except food crop research outreach, adult ed, food access, visitor ed this question won't let me chech all that apply - so adult education, exhibit-based general visitor education

I could only check one area here, but our program goals include community outreach, exhibit-based general visitor education

Only allowed me to select one

Workforce develompment, community outreach, improving food access heirloom vegetables and seed storage

ALL of the above all of the above, will not let me select more than one option cannot check more than one box, depending on division, all of the above apply

155 40. Is your food-related programming an asset to your garden's fundraising goals?

Yes 39 51% Answer Response %

Maybe/Don't 22 29% know

No 15 20%

Total 76 100%

41. How have your food-related programs impacted the sustainability operations of your garden?

Positively 49 69% Answer Response %

Negatively 0 0%

No impact 22 31%

Total 71 100%

156 42. How has your food-related programs impacted media coverage of your garden?

Positively 48 69% Answer Response %

Negatively 0 0%

No impact 22 31%

Total 70 100%

43. Have your food-related programs expanded relationships with outside organizations?

Yes 68 88% Answer Response %

No 5 6%

Don't know 4 5%

Total 77 100%

157 44. Please select the types of organizations with which you communicate or collaborate

Local, state and Answer Response20 29%% federal agencies

Health or human service 2 3%

organizations

Private or corporate 3 4%

foundations

Academic or research 12 18%

institutions

Community groups (eg. community 28 41%

gardens, youth organizations)

Religious 0 0% organizations

For-profit 1 1% businesses

Gleaning 2 3% organizations

Total 68 100%

158 45. Please share any additional thoughts or comments in the space below.

Text ResponseA couple of your buttons would not allow for multiple choices.

Several questions that asked me to click all that apply only take one answer. We are rolling out the restoration of the Roosevelt home Garden this year (road path fence construction begins in April) for a Centennial project. Program planning, research, fundraising and networking are well under way, but the garden does not yet exist so I had to give you some "Don't Know" answers and leave somethings more broad or more vague than they may end up being once we have the garden in place. Will have a small staff - myself and one more gardener who cover many gardens and projects around the site. This additional gardener is not yet in place. Running a well organized volunteer program will be essential to the success of the project. a few of the options (collaborations...) will not allow me to select more than one option- may want to address quickly

The last question wouldn't let me select multiple answers.

Ours is a unique situation. The vegetables are a legacy piece that is still private and the used by a private family. That part of the operation is still funded by private funds. In the future, this operation will become public so we must decide if we want to continue this part of the operation or transfer the lands to growing other plants.

Our Backyard Vegetable Garden is maintained by Master Gardeners and supplies food to the local food bank. It is used in our education programs.

Several of the questions only allowed one answer (radio buttons) instead of "all that apply" (checkboxes), even though the question asked for multiple selections. Just letting you know. Our food garden is used in a college course, but otherwise is managed and funded through a donor, in memory of her son who was a former student at our university. It is also not accessible to the public except by prior arrangement.

The survey would not allow the selection of multiple selections

Last page would not let me pick all the available choices that would include our various partners we work with. if it would let me choose it would be most all of the

159 choices

On a few of your questions it says to select all answers that apply, but you are actually only allowed to select one. Just FYI.

Corporate volunteer groups love to work in the vegetable garden.

Our garden integrates concepts of agriculture and ecology to create awareness of the interrelationship between the two systems.

We are a university based arboretum that does not have a formal plant collection or garden, but rather uses our entire campus for arboretum program, with the goal of immersing our programing into daily campus life. Our community organic garden is a major draw for our student volunteers and has increased our interactions with other entities, such as sustainability and wellness and health promotions. We have a ways to go to develop the curriculum we would like to have for our program. FYI, on several questions in this survey when asked to check all that apply, I was sure that the multiple checks were being recorded because the dot fill in did not remain when I hit other choices. we also work a lot with community organizations and run another garden called the Volunteer Sustained Agriculture (VSA), whereby 20 volunteers work together to raise and share the crops. The excess goes to a local food bank.

In the last question, it only allow one answer and there were many

The last question also only allowed one answer.

For several questions the survey asked me to select all that were applicable, but would only let me select one answer. Further, I should be able to go back.

Savannah has worked with us during summers for two years and is a senior education major who is seeking grants to fund just such an outreach.

Great idea for a section, this agriculture and food will only increase in relevance.

We also share collaborations with local organizations, youth groups, private and public foundations, schools and so on.

Some of the "check all that apply" buttons would only let me select one option. Just

160 letting you know. Thank you.

Edible garden landscapes were undertaken for five years as a new, special program garnering outside funding from our non-profit fund raising organization and a corporate sponsor. Management wanted a change in special programming to drive attendance and secure sponsorship.

The Wildflower Center has had a very small edible native plant garden (approx. 170 sq. ft.) for a number of years and is the topic of occasional tours about native edibles lead for the public. We are in the process of developing an additional 3000 sq. ft. "farm" where we can grow larger quantities of edible species as a pilot for a potentially on-going project. The garden will be planted in the next few weeks and our hope is to harvest produce and measure production to fine tune the project going into the future. Our on-site cafe has been enthusiastic about incorporating our native plants into their menu as we have more to offer them. There are more layers to this project, but that gives you a "taste" of where we are headed with this. We call the project "A Taste of Place"

This is a very young institution with little collection development. Uses of plants by people is the collection theme. We still have a long way to go.

The survey is flawed in asking for multiple partners or goals and only allowing one answer. We are just embarking on a food and culinary program that includes community outreach (partnering with the extension service), expanded food, nutrition, gardening educational classes, outdoor kitchen, edible garden, and new staff.

There are glitches in the survey. When offered "please check all that apply" option only one click is allowed. Thus these results are not fully accurate.

Not all of the questions that asked for multiple responses would permit multiple selections.

The previous question allowed only one answer, but we work with local government, schools and private funders as well. so glad the Association is getting into this arena in a more deliberate way

DBG is in the start up phase and we are currently obtaining permits and launching our phase one capital campaign. Our horticulturist, myself, and our BOD are all very interested in a food production teaching garden. It is also my background because I

161 current operate a small organic farm that produces specialty crops.

Our University-affiliated community garden, only a five minute walk from main campus has been hugely popular with the student population that is eager to develop gardening skills and welcomes the opportunity to work toward a common mission and enjoy the outdoors.

The last question on partners only allowed one answer. We have many partners in government, the nonprofit sector (social service organizations, schools, youth-based organizations), etc.

Two recent questions would only allow 1 answer though I was instructed to select all that apply.

Our programming is new and still very much under development but is the primary focus of our latest capital campaign. Our non-profit institution (an historic estate) has a primary goal of education. In our case it is for the general public (our visitors). But we are collaborating with the local high school in creating educational programming specifically for high school students. Currently one high school class meets here on our property for each of their class periods. They grew vegetables in outside gardens in late summer and fall, did science experiments and observations in our wetlands adjacent to our fields, and now are growing microgreens in our brand new greenhouse, doing winter tracking exercises, and learning from our goat dairy. In the future, this will be much more robust with students spending time here, on the farm, daily. Growing vegetables, caring for animals, and interacting with our paying guests as we build and develop our farm and programming. The students will learn not only gardening and animal husbandry skills but will also learn in a deeper, more intellectually meaningful way about economics, philosophy, agriculture, politics, art,... and more.

We are hoping to include these types of programming in the future as resources become more readily availalbe.

Your survey tool did not allow for checking multiple boxes on questions designed to do so. Example, on the last question I would have marked every box. Our food- related initiatives factor heavily in our overall operations. In addition to the pure value of the work in changing the fabric of our community, our food-related initiatives have broken down the physical barriers of the "formal garden walls". It has given us a relevance for the broader community that we would not otherwise have. Our mantra:

162 it matters not whether you're growing flowers or food, we're all about nurturing the joy of growing.

For the previous question we collaborate more than just with for-profit businesses - academics, non-for-profit businesses Also for the staffing question, we have several staff who take this on as part of their roles (e.g. our adult education coordinator commits some of his time to this, but not half-time; same with gardeners). We are very interested in more food-related programming, that moves beyond the culinary arts; we would like to showcase sustainable home food gardening practices that more broadly address some of the other topics asked about in this survey.

Our primary food production garden is through the All American Selections program. We are a display garden for both vegetables and flowers.

Two of the questions that were supposed to allow multiple choices would only allow one (survey glitch?). Our botanic garden is very new - just opened in spring of 2014 and is in the early stages of development. We are almost all volunteers with limited staff, but have raised over a million dollars, have a visitor center and several new gardens and are making good progress in our evolution. We manage 25 acres in a 56- acre public park, with the 5-acre Traverse City Community Gardens being one of the other entities at the park. Eventually the botanic garden will have a special garden specifically dedicated to edible plants, but for now we are enjoying a special collaboration with the Community Garden (sharing the design, planting, maintenance and harvesting) of an area within the Community Garden. This has been an excellent way for us to make progress on our goal of an edible garden prior to developing the necessary funds and staff to construct that garden which is already in our master site plan.

Moving from a mostly traditional display garden into a more actively engaging and participatory type of garden area has been good for us both internally and externally. Visitors find the Discovery Garden compelling, particularly families, and they bring their own food history to share with family members. Internally it seems to have helped staff members see a different way of engaging visitors and staff are excited about more outreach.

Two of the questions above would only allow one selection not multiple.

I feel that most cities have strong community gardens and Indianapolis reflects that. Our general focus has been on teaching kids about where there food comes from and

163 how to grow it. We are researching if we should move into having more food based programming for a wider audience. previous question does not allow me to select multiple audiences. We collaborate with govt agencies, foundations, local grass roots orgs, and private individuals.

When we open our new food and herb garden, called 'A Tasteful Place', we will have daily demonstrations and food gardening and cooking activities. The projection for opening is Fall of 2017.

Previous question, "Please select the types of organizations with which you communicate or collaborate" only allows one answer, I would have chosen more.

The questions "Please select types of org with which we communicate or collaborate will not let me select multiple responses. The answer is all of the above and more.

The Arboretum is in the process of restructuring it's mission and purpose in the community.

The system did not enable me to "check all that apply" on most of those designated questions.

Virginia's First Lady is spear heading a food initiative in Virginia, "Jack's Vegetable Garden" and the "over the fence" community outreach/education may become a model for other communities to follow. Master Gardener volunteers plan, plant and tend the garden (with staff guidance) in addition to focusing on the over the fence education and sharing of Virginia Tech "how to" printed materials. This model can be incorporated in any community with public space with high visitation, master gardeners and a small budget.

We have Vancouver's oldest food demonstration garden which also happens to be located very centrally in our larger garden. We also discuss First Nations and their semi-agricultural practices in our Garry Oak Ecosystem. We hope to do more nutrition classes specifically related to the 2016 International Year of Pulses

164 StatisticTotal Responses Value50

46. Would you be willing to answer follow-up questions related to this survey?

No 10 21% Answer Response %

Yes. you may contact me for 37 79% follow-up questions

Total 47 100%

47. Thank you! Please provide your name and email address so we can follow-up.

165