A therapeutic garden group helps abused youth develop pro-social skills and care for the landThis article outlines and evaluates five years of eco-social work practice at a community garden associated with the Cara House for abused children in Sydney, Australia. Social workers established a weekly gardening group for youth age 6-16 who had experienced abuse, violence, and neglect as a “de-therapized” approach to heal the self, others, and the environment. Rejecting the outcomes-based paradigm of adults administering and evaluating therapeutic interventions, their community garden projects were founded on core principles of caring for the land and facilitating egalitarian relationships where youth played key decision-making roles. The study examined qualitative data from 5 years of in-house evaluations to understand how 46 youth participants experienced the gardening programs.
In this participatory program, youth developed in-house questions to evaluate the program each week in order to help adult facilitators understand how to enhance their experiences. At the end of each session, a youth volunteer would ask the questions and provide group facilitators with completed responses. Facilitators collated youths’ feedback on the program, analyzed it thematically, and presented it to the agency annually to evaluate the garden groups and improve them. This article highlights major themes from five years of this qualitative program evaluation data.
Youths’ feedback on the therapeutic gardening groups largely centered around the themes of relationship-building, enhancement of social skills, self-efficacy, self-esteem, gardening skills, relationship with beauty, the opportunity to use imagination, being outdoors in a garden, and care for the land. Gains in pro-social values and skills was the most obvious outcome of this garden-based intervention with youth consistently highlighting the importance of group work processes to building relationships, increasing their confidence in socializing, and feeling better about themselves. Caring for the land was another key outcome with youth describing increased gardening knowledge, eco-responsibility, appreciation of beauty, and reverence for nature. Anecdotally, the authors also noted that many CaraCare children not involved in the gardening program also used the garden space on their own time.
These findings point to community gardens as potential places of healing for young people who have experienced violence, trauma, abuse, exploitation, and neglect. In this case, a garden-based program became a therapeutic space where youth who have experienced maltreatment developed better relationships with themselves, others, and the natural world. In addition, the program’s egalitarian and inclusive relationships counterbalanced the abusive and coercive relationships that children had experienced outside of the program. The authors argue that soil, plants, and children’s imaginations can be fertile sites of eco-social work practice. By highlighting a successful 5-year program in which gardening worked as a therapeutic intervention, this study aimed to contribute to the greening of social work and to encourage more research that explores gardens as sites of creative eco-social work practice.
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