“The garden helps you do better in school because it keeps you healthy,” an Urban Sprouts sixth-grader recently told his garden teacher. Another noted, “In the garden, I learned to grow up and be a successful person.”

Why Training & Leadership?

Urban Sprouts has shown that school gardens help youth to do better in school, eat more vegetables, and get much-needed exercise. We have seen that school gardens do much more: they transform dilapidated schools and change the way young people feel about themselves. School gardens can improve self-esteem, the health and wellness of communities, and the environmental health of our neighborhoods, cities and local farmland. School gardens can impact communities through a ripple effect that starts with individual youth and families, and broadens to improve schools, to green communities, and to drive a demand for locally- and sustainably-grown food, supporting regional economic growth.

However, not just any school garden will bring about these inspiring changes. What we do in the garden with youth matters. That’s why Urban Sprouts has created a ‘Recipe for Success’ that defines the quantity and quality of experiences in the school garden needed to help youth, families and schools make real change in their lives and communities.

Now, the tide has turned for school gardens, as the public understands that our current food system causes environmental damage, dependence on foreign oil, and obesity in our communities. The Obamas’ own garden has brought the power of school and home gardens into view. At Urban Sprouts, we receive more phone calls and emails that we can handle from teachers, parents, health educators, and researchers asking for our help and advice. To meet this demand, we plan to share our vision, methods, and results through a program of training, coaching and interactive web-based tools.

Urban Sprouts seeks investment and support to develop this training and capacity-building curriculum and to take it to schools and organizations throughout California, in order to share our program model, the research on which our model is based, and the tools we use to implement it in practice. In the first year, we’ll provide four trainings to support 100 educators and parents in creating school gardens that will reach thousands of youth.

Training Content

Urban Sprouts has developed a research-tested program model for garden-based education that goes beyond knowledge to foster behavior change, helping youth and their families to eat healthier and make real changes in their daily lives, schools, and communities. The Garden-based Education Model is the ‘Recipe for Success’ that we will share, to enable other schools, teachers, and health practitioners to develop effective and impacting school garden programs. Read more about Urban Sprouts’ Garden-Based Education Model Here and Here.

While existing publications and trainings provide school garden lesson plans and basic gardening skills, Urban Sprouts is unique in providing step-by-step tools to implement a school-wide program that impacts youth and their families, plus the tools to document and measure program success and results. To date, Urban Sprouts has presented an interactive introductory training on our program model, how we use it in practice, and a summary of research results from 2006-2008.

The training will include the following components:

• One full day of training, tailored to the local community by selecting three to five from a menu of five topical modules (can be extended to two days);
• Two Webinars, engaging participants with a brief introduction before the day of training and a guide to jumpstart implementation afterwards.
• Online tools will be accessible to all participants, including visual aids, rubrics, checklists, program evaluation tools, and social networking among all participants.
• One-on-one coaching, including an optional additional three hours of individual coaching for each training participant or team after the training.
• Gardens for Learning: Creating and Sustaining Your School Garden, a guidebook created by the California School Garden Network.

The five training modules include:

1. Core Theory and Frameworks: the power of school gardens and the research behind them
2. From Theory to Practice: using planning and design tools, experiencing the physical school garden learning environment
3. Making your Case & Building your Team: exercises will prepare participants to increase school and community involvement in the school garden
4. Measuring your Success: interactive and dynamic evaluation techniques participants can implement
5. Electives on Emerging Issues: model lessons on emerging lesson topics in the field, like food systems, farm-to-school and school meals, entrepreneurship, production gardens, food access and food justice, and more.

Urban Sprouts’ Training and Leadership Initiative Objectives for 2009-2010:
1. Develop and refine training models, materials, coaching systems, and web-based tools, through a collaboration between our curriculum development staff, our evaluation specialist, and a youth development professional and life coach.
2. In the first year, conduct four trainings including coaching assistance and web-based tools, reaching at least 100 schools, teachers, health educators, and other practitioners.
3. Of participants in training and coaching program, 70% will report increases in their knowledge and capacity to implement garden-based nutrition education programs, as measured by post-test evaluation surveys.

Key Leaders & Partners

Training components are being developed and tested during the fall of 2009, through collaboration between: Urban Sprouts’ Director, an educator with six years of experience implementing and testing the Program Model; Dr. Michelle Ratcliffe, researcher and educator who developed the Garden-based Education Model and partners with us through her position as Farm-to-School Director for Ecotrust; and Sangita Kumar, an organizational development consultant, trainer, and Life Coach specializing in youth development models.

So far, we’ve presented and tested the one-day training in full or in part at the UC Botanical Garden’s Annual School Gardens Conference, the Conference of the San Francisco Green Schoolyard Alliance, the Puget Sound School Gardens Summit, and as part of a teacher education course at San Francisco State University. We’ve also presented our model and results at the California Department of Health’s 2009 Childhood Obesity Conference and the Network for a Healthy California Annual Conference.

To broaden our reach throughout California, we’ll partner with local organizations to assist with needs-assessment, logistics and outreach. Partner organizations include: UC Cooperative Extension in Alameda County, Youth Leadership Institute in San Mateo County and Fresno County, UC Cooperative Extension in Ventura County, the Center for Food and Justice for Riverside County. We’ll also partner closely with the California School Garden Network and the Network for a Healthy California. In addition to providing trainings, Urban Sprouts will continue to present at conferences and submit articles for journal publication.

*How You Can Help!*

As Urban Sprouts embarks on this exciting leadership initiative, we need support from our community in order to be successful. You can help us in these ways:

1. Take our survey for Garden Educators and schools on what YOU need to strengthen your school garden program.
2. We’d love your ideas and suggestions to make this initiative successful! Leave your comments here (or click Discussion tab at the top of this page) or you can email us.
3. Share with us your ideas about funders who might be interested in partnering with us. Email them a link to this page!
4. Invest directly in our work! Make a secure online donation to Urban Sprouts today.