SLAGC URSP VA Garden Educational Curriculum

The principle of slow food is teaching people how to eat food that is healthy for them, for the growers, and for the planet. Education is at the root of this concept–it is necessary that people learn the science behind nutritious food in order to cultivate it for themselves. This can be taught through both hands-on learning in community gardens and guided learning in the classroom, using simplified guides. It is likely that the ideologies and practices associated with the slow food movement and community gardening can be taught in an efficient and impactful way. Our research question asks whether condensing broader gardening lessons into a more digestible curriculum is more beneficial to veterans involved in the gardening program at the West LA VA campus. This question and approach can be applied to the problems observed across the entire system of Greater Los Angeles Veteran Affairs (VA) campuses associated with staving off food insecurity among veterans afflicted with mental health issues and a lack of resources. Maintaining this garden and establishing this program will also give veterans the opportunity to undergo horticultural therapy (HT), a form of therapy that, according to the American Horticultural Society, is “a process through which participants work towards improving their overall wellness by active or passive involvement in plant and garden-based activities with facilitation of a registered horticultural therapist.” Studies have shown its effectiveness among veteran populations in improving mental health outcomes by lowering the intensity of negative mental health indicators, such as depression severity, measured salivary cortisol levels, stress levels, and loneliness. Our work in creating a proper introductory-level gardening program will hopefully serve as inspiration for other VAs across the country to adopt similar horticulture therapy-related activities for their communities. Our ultimate objective is to establish a long-term framework that will stimulate veteran engagement in the sustainable gardening program. It will be based on the texts of Know, Sow, Grow, which is a curriculum created by The Edible Schoolyard Project to teach elementary school students gardening vocabulary and skills. The bigger-picture motivation behind our project is to reduce the number of food-insecure veterans and to make an impact by developing investment in the garden. Ending its stagnation will attract funding, partnerships, and energy that the garden greatly needs. There is great potential in the program–we further aim to publicize and promote it so that the program can have the widest reach possible. The development of an accessible and interactive gardening curriculum to introduce the space to veterans is crucial to the success of the West LA VA Gardens initiative. We have worked mainly with our stakeholder, Jennifer Allen, a nurse practitioner and manager of the Whole Health Program at the West LA VA Campus to devise a 6 week curriculum for the veterans. We learned about effective teaching methods, brainstormed ideas for how to tailor the Edible Schoolyard curriculum to veterans, and created presentations based off of our adapted lesson plans. Based on this, we piloted our class in mid-April 2024. These classes were led by our team and involved identification of basic plant anatomy, mastery of beginner gardening principles, and hands-on experience with potting, growing, and caring for seedlings. To supplement our presentations, we created printed copies of our lessons, in the form of booklets, for attendees to reference throughout the class as well as at home. We hope that printed materials assisted in keeping attendees engaged during class and allowed them to better translate the skills learned during class to skills they can implement in their homes.