Placer County Community Garden Leader’s Tour: Fostering Connection, Sharing, and Place-Based Leadership
2024
Through the Placer County Community Garden Network, the community garden leaders’ tours created space for reflection, sharing, storytelling, and place-based learning. As part of my role at Placer RCD, I created the Network and facilitated these intentional gatherings to not only learn from the leaders themselves, but to help leaders learn and support one another—and this often led to incredible vulnerability in their successes and challenges. Because this article was written with an audience of other community garden networks around the country, I shared the undergriding framework of the meetings which used Kolb’s experiential learning cycle (framing, experience, reflection) supported by an Integral Theory understanding.
Medium / Project Type
Skills Used
Toolkit
Project role(s)
Values and Ethos
Reflection as a Teacher
The event emphasized noticing and integrating experience with reflection not as an afterthought, but as the center of learning.
Community Organizing and Relationship
By gathering leaders across the region, the tour nurtured networks of support through knowledge exchange, storytelling, and care.
Storytelling as Meaning-Making
Narrative framing, cultural sharing, and site-based storytelling helped participants understand their gardens as living expressions of heritage and identity.
Work Samples
Note: The materials in this portfolio are the property of the Placer County Resource Conservation District.