Community gardens provide numerous benefits, are important to sustain, and are significant to public health. They go beyond tangible benefits such as improved food security, nutrition and physical activity and can be the host of intangible benefits such as improved leadership, social networks, and quality of life. The essence of a community gardens dynamic transcends across multiple intervention levels making the community garden a flexible initiative. However, recent evidence indicates that community gardens struggle with discontinuation. The overarching goal of this paper is to examine longevity and sustainability issues as they relate to community gardens. I will apply a systematic framework of organizational structure and improvement (Sustainability Assessment Modeling (SAM)) to better understand community garden sustainability. Specifically, I propose the use of the SAM framework to develop a community garden assessment. SAM quantifies stakeholders values, perceptions, and both economic and environmental costs. One aim of this paper is to explore the literature related to SAM and how this model can relate to public health, with a discussion of its methods, strengths, and limitations. The ultimate objective is to synthesize this information into a proposal of an effective, sustainable-focused assessment for community gardens. The participatory assessment process I propose will utilize indicators of organizational strengths, weaknesses and success of community gardens, such as longevity.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:PITT/oai:PITTETD:etd-03282010-183213 |
| Date | 28 June 2010 |
| Creators | Nipper, Danielle |
| Contributors | Jeanette M. Trauth, Ph.D, Wesley M. Rohrer, Ph.D, Christopher R. Keane, ScD., MPH |
| Publisher | University of Pittsburgh |
| Source Sets | University of Pittsburgh |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-03282010-183213/ |
| Rights | restricted, I hereby certify that, if appropriate, I have obtained and attached hereto a written permission statement from the owner(s) of each third party copyrighted matter to be included in my thesis, dissertation, or project report, allowing distribution as specified below. I certify that the version I submitted is the same as that approved by my advisory committee. I hereby grant to University of Pittsburgh or its agents the non-exclusive license to archive and make accessible, under the conditions specified below, my thesis, dissertation, or project report in whole or in part in all forms of media, now or hereafter known. I retain all other ownership rights to the copyright of the thesis, dissertation or project report. I also retain the right to use in future works (such as articles or books) all or part of this thesis, dissertation, or project report. |
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