Planning a Successful School & Community Garden Program Summer 2026

For this assignment you will organize you project timeline, think about next steps, and set goals for these next steps. There are three parts to this assignment, and you can submit all as individual files or in one complete document.

Your Sustainability & Support Plan in Assignment 5.1 helped you organize all the different elements needed to get your garden project started and keep it going into future years: organizing team, garden site, purpose of the garden, and keeping it going year after year. Use this plan to take things a step further and do the following:

1. Complete and submit the Going Further Checklist to make sure your garden project begins and continues successfully.
2. Create and submit a more developed timeline with the Garden Development/Activities Timeline, to include both gardening tasks and learning activities. This can be phased by months, seasons or even years if it is multi-phase project. A timeline is often required by funders and is a useful road map for long term planning.
3. Set three goals: think about the next three steps you would like to take to move your project forward. Read more about goals below.

Complete and submit the three assignments above for instructor feedback. You will add these three assignments (revised if needed based on feedback) to your Final Portfolio next week.

Goal Setting

Goal setting is an important and often overlooked practice in developing a new program. Goals help clarify your values, ethics and what is important regarding the program you're working with/creating. Goals help serve as a guide when we get overwhelmed - we can take a moment to pause, look back at our goals and then move forward efficiently.

Perhaps you know first-hand, with gardening as with many hobbies, it can be easy to dive right in without much of a plan and quickly feel in over your head or overwhelmed by the amount of work the garden needs. Having well-articulated goals ensures you can stay on track and keep gardening an activity that is enjoyable for the long term. For this assignment, please think about the next three steps you would like to take to move your project forward.  Choose at least three different goals. For each goal, list at least 2 specific methods as to how you plan to achieve that goal. Goals should be SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound). See goal wiring tips below: 

Goal writing tips

• Write goals in the present tense – it gives them more weight when you read them.
• Each goal should express an overall ethic/desire you have.
• Goals should be specific. If you want your school or community garden to donate food to a local food bank, how much? If you want the garden to attract pollinators, which ones?
• Keep your goals achievable.
• Remember SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, relevant and time-bound).

For example, your goal to add an irrigation system for easier summer watering could be stated this way:

Writing your goals in this way makes them more immediate and powerful!