There are so many good stories to be told of the deeds and benefits community gardens and indeed community gardeners provide but not enough of these stories are coming to light. Why is this?
Well for those of us involved in the day to day running of gardens, as volunteers, every action is personal time committed to a cause. Time is precious and like any other organisation our gardens involve costs, administration, fundraising, compliance and reporting to exist.
So in a time poor environment the storytelling is often left off the list and much of the value our gardens provide is largely unaccounted for or left to the realms of subjective data.
This project aims to provide a series of tools to community gardens so they more easily tell their story.
Tools
We’ve completed a research project exploring the many benefits gardens provide so we offer that research, with references, for you to leverage
From that same research we’ve developed an impact framework tool so any garden can select their own measures, be those quantitative and qualitative, and generate their own frameworks to work with.
We have also developed a carbon calculator so that any compost operation can enter their own numbers to calculate greenhouse gas emissions savings.
We hope this work provides every community group the opportunity to not only measure but also celebrate the role of your gardeners. As such all of our content and tools are offered freely leveraging creative commons licensing.
Aotearoa Community Gardens
In 2018 it was reported that there was still no single source of truth for community garden efforts in New Zealand. This has since been corrected with the first national community gardens survey conducted during 2020. You can review the national survey work conducted by Aotearoa Community Gardens here…