Today SLHI is releasing Community Gardens: Your guide to Understanding, Starting and Sustaining a Community Garden in your Neighborhood. Developed in partnership with the Elemental Group, the workbook outlines practical, relevant information for communities of all capacity, skill and ability levels through both step-by-step instructions and expansive resource lists.

Frankly, there’s no reason for an interested community to “reinvent the wheel” or start from scratch when there is Arizona-specific information to share. The idea is to make starting and maintaining a community garden not only possible, but probable.

The Community Gardens workbook is the first workbook from this partnership, but it will not be the last. SLHI and the Elemental Group LLC will be developing a series of workbooks in the coming months to share more of our work for community options to improve health by design.

So while you try your hand at gardening, keep a lookout for the next workbook in the series. Future reports will cover:

1. No Child Left Inside: Community-based strategies for increasing physical activity among children, youth, adults and families.

2. Creating Resilient Neighborhoods: A how-to resource guide for cultivating resiliency in local neighborhoods.

3. Urban Farms: An overview of best practices and how to integrate them into our communities.