Each garden has an important story to tell. These stories can serve as lessons to other communities so they build on them and develop their own stories.
Though with all the hard work and gardening to be done many of these stories aren’t being captured or told as well as they could be. As a result the value and proper place of community gardens in our villages and cities is sometimes misunderstood.
So we’ve built some tools that any community garden can use to tell their story. If you’re anxious to get started just click on the shortcuts below to access these tools.
To better understand how these tools came about and how they fit in together as part and parcel of a structured approach then read on…
Impact Framework
For those involved in community gardening we instinctually know that the benefits of community gardening go far beyond those of growing a lovely nutrient dense spud or building quality compost from your community waste. The challenge is converting that instinctual knowledge into a quantitative evidence basis that contributes to your own unique story.
Through a collaboration entered into by Innermost Gardens, Wellington City Council and Victoria University a research project was formed that would seek out those benefits, uncover solid research to validate those benefits and validate measures that could be applied to test those benefits.
Over a two year period an impact framework was developed consisting of 6 impact areas, 19 key performance indicators with 100 measures categorised under each of those indicators.
Build your own…
We want every community garden to be able to tell their own evidence based story. To do that, leveraging the research outcomes from this project, we’ve developed some web based tools that anyone can use. The first of which is the impact framework tool, which enables one to select measurements from a range of impact categories and create a tailor made impact framework. Take a look at the framework and tool here…
Your Carbon Impact
Community gardens have a surprisingly and significant potential to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions and sequester carbon through their composting operations. The emission mitigation potential, in the form of kilograms of carbon equivalent, is an important value metric for any city and given approximately 70% of community gardens in New Zealand reside on council land this metric represents something of value to both parties. To help gardeners qualify those benefits Victoria University have developed a compost carbon calculator specifically for the purpose of calculating ones emissions mitigation potential.
Stakeholder Lens
You may come to this from a different perspective be that as a City Council Administrator, Community Gardener or as a member of the Community. So we’ve compiled a highlights reel for you and pointers to relevant tools from those perspectives here…
Councils
Community gardens facilitate safer and more liveable communities. With regenerative practices they provide a range of ecological and civil services that contribute positively to a climate change agenda. Let’s dig into those values.
Gardeners
We know how hard it can be to run community gardens and tell your stories at the same time. So we’ve built some tools you can use that will provide the basis and data you need for your own narration.
Community
A community garden is only a garden without an invested community. Though with a little bit of energy invested the output rewards become exponential and multifaceted. Let’s explore the community case.
Literature Review
Much of the information on this site has come from the Literature Review conducted as an important aspect of this project. The literature review identifies a range of local and international reports and studies that focus on community gardens social, health or environmental impacts and how they have been measured. You can review the report here…