GROWING RESILIENCE

What is it?

Growing Resilience was a community-based research project that ran from 2016 - 2017 and was designed to bring home gardens to households on the Wind River Reservation in Fremont County, Wyoming and to measure the impact of those gardens on participants’ health.

The Growing Resilience project leveraged tribal assets of land, family, culture and community health organizations to develop and evaluate home food gardens as a family-based health promotion intervention to reduce disparities suffered by Native Americans in nearly every measure of health.

Growing Resilience Goals

Support 100 tribal families in Wind River in starting home food gardens
Evaluate the family health impacts of these gardens
Share what we learn with other tribal communities and with the nation

Growing Resilience Partners

Woman and three children posing with plants growing in raised garden beds

Funding for this project came from a UW INBRE award supported by grants from the National Center for Research Resources (5P20RR016474-12) and the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (8 P20 GM 103432-12) from the National Institutes of Health.

UW led the health data collection element of Growing Resilience. The project director and principal investigator was Christine M. Porter, and the project manager was Alyssa Wechsler. Melvin Arthur, an enrolled member of the Northern Arapaho tribe, led the qualitative assessment of the project.

Key Take-aways

The studies by the research team were able to measure positive trends in better body mass index, increased hand strength, and better mental health. Participating study members also reported needing less intervention from medications such as anti-depressants, blood pressure, painkillers and glucose regulation. These benefits came from the physical activity of gardening and being outside as well as having easier access to healthy fruits and vegetables.

Gardening as an activity also helped in other areas of life, creating stronger social networks and cultural ties, as well as boosting personal senses of achievement and satisfaction. This was true not only on a personal level but on a community level as well, where the project was able to create new infrastructure for gardens at home and in towns resulting in a feeling of community revitalization and healing. It also created a new economic opportunity in the form of Tribal Farmers Markets on the Wind River Reservation and an empowering transformation from being consumers to taking on roles as producers.