Exploring the Impacts of Three Types of Community-Assisted Gardens on Burmese Refugees: Vegetables from My Garden Are Fresh and Delicious

Advancing climate change will likely alter the availability of food and diminish community resilience. To partially address these challenges for urban communities, collective or community-assisted gardens have been recognized as a useful policy option. In addition to these benefits, community-assisted gardens improve the efficacy of refugee resettlement programs by providing access to fresh produce. We explored the experiences and perceptions of Burmese refugees participating in three different community-assisted garden programs; individual backyard gardens, personal-use community gardens, and enterprise community-assisted gardens. Our semistructured interviews of 18 Burmese refugees resulted in three broad themes: benefits, challenges, and issues related to recruitment and support for gardening. Subthemes of benefits included economic benefits, improved diet and physical health, and improved social connections. Our findings illustrate that a complex mixture of benefits and challenges were experienced by Burmese refugees participating in the three programs resulting in multidimensional factors of well-being encompassed by nutritional, economic, and social health elements. Specific benefits from the three programs included: strengthening family relationships, providing families with culturally relevant food, fresh organic vegetables, saving money on the family’s food budget, improving social relationships with community members. We suggest community-assisted gardens can play an important role in refugee resettlement efforts and ameliorate global climate change on a local scale, but these programs would benefit from a greater recognition of the complexity of issues faced by refugees.