Participatory Research for Scientific, Educational, and Community Benefits: A Case Study from Brooklyn Community Gardens

Supporting community food production is a key strategy for all the community-based partners in Food Dignity, a community-university research partnership dedicated to supporting and learning from food justice organizations. Participatory action research (PAR) may develop knowledge and skills for sustainable agriculture, thus building gardeners’ capacities to refine, implement, and share locally appropriate, sustainable food production practices. However, little research has explored the possibilities and challenges of PAR with urban gardeners. In the context of Food Dignity, I examine those possibilities in a case study of a PAR project on cover crops with gardeners in Brooklyn, New York, USA. I address two questions: (1) How can PAR be designed in an urban community gardening context to achieve positive outcomes for science, education, and communities? and (2) What are the challenges, and how might facilitators address them? Several practices contributed to positive outcomes in our project. First, engaging gardeners in cover crop monitoring strengthened their knowledge of ecological processes (e.g., nitrogen fixation) and FoodDignity a * Corresponding author: Megan M. Gregory, Department of Horticulture, Cornell University. Megan Gregory is now Community Gardening Coordinator, North Carolina Cooperative Extension; Forsyth County Center, 1450 Fairchild Road; Winston-Salem, NC 27105 USA; gregormm@forsyth.cc or meganmgregory1@gmail.com b Scott J. Peters, Department of Development Sociology; 264 Warren Hall, Cornell University; Ithaca, NY 14853 USA.