Urban Sprouts

 By cultivating school gardens in San Francisco’s under-served neighborhoods, Urban Sprouts partners with youth and their families to build eco-literacy, equity, wellness, and community.

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.

What we do in the garden with youth matters. That’s why Urban Sprouts has created the Garden-Based Education Model 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. 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.

Urban Sprouts has field-tested and evaluated the Garden-based Education Model developed by Dr. Michelle Ratcliffe (Ratcliffe et al., 2006; Ratcliffe et al., 2009). This model combines the Social Cognitive Theory of behavior change (Bandura, 1986), youth development theory and ecoliteracy models to determine the quantity and quality of garden-based experiences that enable youth to improve their health and nutrition. Learning that takes place in an interactive and multi-sensory context—the school garden—helps youth retain new knowledge and attitudes in the long-term. Results from Urban Sprouts’ program evaluations show real changes in participating youths’ attitudes towards the environment, consumption of fruits and vegetables, and motivation to make change in their eating habits at school and at home.