Barriers to community garden success: Demonstrating framework for expert consensus to inform policy and practice

Community gardens receive much attention for the benefits offered to participants and their communities. However, research has documented a variety of barriers and challenges that community gardeners and support organizations face in establishing and maintaining gardens. These issues may dilute service providers' impact, by reducing their attention to the more pressing factors that result in garden failure. Additionally, access to resources to mitigate these challenges and barriers differ from region to region. This demonstrates a significant need to identify the most pervasive barriers, challenges and obstacles in order to refine the focus of support programs and provide concentrated efforts to better position community gardens for success. The purpose of the study was to demonstrate the use of a framework to inform the development of policies and programs that stakeholders, including Extension, can adopt for overcoming the most frustrating impediments to success. It did so by using an underused but appropriately matched tool, the Delphi technique, which can easily be adopted by community garden stakeholders. Because the types of stakeholders are diverse and challenges are complex, the objectives were to determine whether consensus could be achieved and whether a core set of barriers exist. The group agreed upon four barriers, with the highest level of agreement centering on the challenge of time demand for community engagement.