Teens as Teachers in the Garden : Cultivating a Sustainable Model for Teaching Healthy Living

School gardens are an ideal space to deliver a healthy living curriculum, such as nutrition and physical activity education, to elementary school youth. However, public schools often lack the resources and support to establish sustainable garden-based programming. We created the Healthy Living Ambassador program, a collaborative after-school garden program in low-income communities that brought together resources from schools, community programs, and University of California Cooperative Extension. This school garden program featured culturally competent teens as teachers to serve as near-peer educators and mentors to elementary school youth. The program development model incorporated lessons from Journal of Youth Development | http://jyd.pitt.edu/ | Vol. 13 Issue 3 DOI 10.5195/jyd.2018.621 Teens as Teachers in the Garden 112 sustainable community-based health program interventions and essential elements of teens-as-teachers programs. We share the program logic model and discuss the successes and challenges of this program model that we encountered while developing a long-term, maintainable community garden program to teach healthy living.


Introduction
Given high obesity rates among youth in the United States and the associated risk of chronic diseases (Hales, Carroll, Fryar, & Ogden, 2017), it is in society's best interest to investigate and develop innovative programs that promote healthful youth behaviors to mitigate this issue.Schools have an important role to play in promoting the health of a nation, as they are the primary place where most children can be easily reached.Furthermore, school gardens are a practical and effective tool for connecting children to food sources that promote healthier lifestyles and greater academic achievement (Ozer, 2007).Garden-based nutrition education programs can improve fruit and vegetable intake (McAleese & Rankin, 2007;Lautenschlager & Smith, 2007) and increase preferences for fruits and vegetables among youth whose original preferences were low (Lineberger & Zajicek, 2000;Ratcliffe, Merrigan, Rogers, & Goldberg, 2011).Additionally, teaching lessons in the school garden may increase children's physical activity and decrease sedentary time throughout the school day (Rees-Punia et al., 2017).Yet, even with the fiscal support of public incentives, creating and sustaining school garden programs remain a challenge (Hazzard, Moreno, Beall, & Zindenberg-Cherr, 2012).
With the "garden in every school" initiative launched in 1994 across California, thousands of school garden beds were built (Eastin, 2013).Yet, school administration and local educational values often determine the level of support for garden programming (Boyle, 2013;Hazzard et al., 2012).Many schools are inadequately equipped with the people, funds, materials, and training needed to achieve and sustain their school garden programming goals (Hazzard, Moreno, Beall, & Zindenberg-Cherr, 2011;Hazzard et al., 2012), resulting in fallow, unused garden beds.Overcoming these barriers is paramount to implementing and maintaining garden programming that successfully promotes healthy living education (Lekies & Eames-Sheavly, 2008).Leveraging cooperative partnerships linking schools, after-school programs, and community-based organizations could provide the needed resources to support sustainable school garden programming and enhanced learning opportunities for youth, families, and community members (Robinson-O 'Brien, Story, & Heim, 2009).This paper reports on the 4-H Healthy Living Ambassador (HLA) program developed and delivered in San Mateo and San Francisco Counties in California.The HLA program brought health, teen leadership, and teamwork to local elementary school gardens through a multifaceted approach connecting University of California Cooperative Extension (UCCE), community-based partnerships, and teens in teaching roles.We frame our discussion of the program's development using the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's (SAMHSA) (2017) five-step strategic planning framework.We provide an overview of program development during the first three growing seasons (2013)(2014)(2015)(2016).Although school gardens were the context, in this paper we specifically focus on the development of the teens-as-teachers aspect of the program and the logic model that guided the program's development; Bolshakova, Gieng, and Sidhu (2018) report details about the garden curriculum and logistics.

Program Development
We modeled our program development framework after a systemic community-based approach (SAMHSA, 2017) that ensures the strengths of both the community and program leadership team are used to create an accurate, valid, and sustainable plan.The five steps in this Strategic Prevention Framework include needs assessment, capacity building, strategic planning, implementation, and evaluation.Sustainability and cultural competency principles were integrated throughout the process to cultivate meaningful, locally relevant programming.

Community Assessment
As a first step, we identified pressing health-related problems and needs as well as some of their contributing factors.Cooperative Extension, working in partnership with the San Mateo County Health System, the San Mateo County Food Systems Alliance, and school districts throughout San Mateo and San Francisco Counties, identified youth well-being and science literacy as key priorities, and school gardens as an underutilized resource that could support youth wellness and science literacy goals.Through these early inquiries, we determined the level of readiness among local community partners and available resources to address these factors.By examining locally relevant data and surveying the community, we began the planning process more efficiently.  .We evaluated the physical space (garden beds, rows, soil, benches, etc.), tools (watering cans, digging tools, etc.), and the presence of cultivated plants and human resource supports associated with garden programming.One key finding from this assessment was that although there were many school gardens across San Mateo County having comparable physical features (e.g., garden beds for planting, soil, water, etc.), across private and public schools, most low-income public school gardens lacked gardening tools, plants, and key personnel to facilitate any type of educational programming in the gardens (Table 1).
UC CalFresh partners who worked with local communities and elementary schools identified youth health and nutrition needs.Of the garden sites surveyed, 20 of the 23 public schools were identified as having at least 50% of their student populations that qualified for the free or reduced-price school meals administered by the USDA National School Lunch Program.
We identified the teens as teachers of younger youths approach (Lee & Murdock, 2001) as a possible sustainable solution to providing garden programming.The teens-as-teachers model has demonstrated promising results, with teens learning and adopting the healthful behavioral practices that they teach to youths (Arnold et al., 2016).Further, the model provides opportunities for adolescents to extend learning for individual growth, and provides a nurturing space to contribute to community growth (Worker, Iaccopucci, Bird, & Horowitz, 2018).
Collaborating with after-school tutoring and homework programs was a natural approach for 4-H, as many out-of-school programs lack capacity and resources to provide students with rigorous, project-based academic programming.Further, reaching underserved youth throughout the state of California was a priority based on the healthy living initiatives launched by the 4-H Youth Development Program.Based on the resource gaps identified, we developed a collaborative, teens-as-teachers support model that would equip, coordinate, and engage multiple stakeholders' involvement in a widespread network to provide sustainable garden programming and realize the garden as a space for developing healthy behaviors.

Capacity Building
This next step built upon the community assessment where we found unmet needs and developed solutions to address them.A focus on building capacity ensured that our counties had the resources and connections necessary to support this newly created teens-as-teachers garden program.Building capacity involved locating sources of funding, engaging stakeholders, and networking with other organizations.

Teens as Teachers in the Garden
In fall 2013, National 4-H Council, with support from the Coca-Cola Foundation, solicited interest from 4-H professionals to apply for a year-long "Youth Voice: Youth Choice" Healthy Living 4-H grant.The focus of the program was on combating obesity by encouraging positive nutritional choices and physical activity.The Council sought to capitalize on 4-H'ers understanding of healthy, balanced living to transform underserved communities.We envisioned this as an opportunity to connect teens as near-peer teachers and mentors to elementary school youth to promote healthy living in underused gardens that needed additional resources.Furthermore, it was an opportunity to develop culturally relevant 4-H programming in targeted neighborhoods previously lacking representation in this organization.Recruiting local teens to serve and teach children (sometimes siblings) from the communities where they were from automatically provided a level of cultural competence and locally relevant understanding of the neighborhood dynamics.With the long history of 4-H training teens to teach across ages being implemented with a variety of content and in a variety of settings (Bird & Subramaniam, 2011;Emil, Dworkin, & Skelly, 2007;Ripberger & Blalock, 2013;Schmitt-McQuitty, 2012;Smith & Enfield, 2002), we had multiple resources to consult.However, to our knowledge, using this model of training teens to teach and deliver garden-based nutrition and physical activity education is the first we are aware of in the published literature.
We integrated best practices identified by Lee and Murdock's (2001) Ten Essential Elements of Teens as Teachers (Table 2), which were associated with the desired outcomes of our teens-asteachers program.The Ten Essential Elements (E1-E10) were incorporated in the Healthy Living Ambassador Logic Model, which is presented in Figure 1.We designed this program to provide training and mentorship to culturally competent teen teachers, who in turn would deliver garden-based nutrition and physical activity education to local elementary school children.Health promotion must be structured as part of a societal commitment (e.g., a social innovation), where comprehensive strategies are realized through local partnerships and collaborations.These collaborations among young people, families, teachers, researchers, and community partners combine resources and supportive efforts, which in turn may provide the impetus to catalyze social change that addresses societal needs such as obesity and chronic disease (Bastien & Holmarsdottir, 2017).The UCCE offices are local problem-solving centers; they are part of a statewide network of UC researchers and educators who bridge UC research with the communities they serve, dedicated to the development of healthy people, communities, food systems, and environments.We leveraged UCCE's expertise in agriculture, natural resources, and human resources along with our strong relationships, understanding, and collaborations among our programs and partners, especially those with a youth focus.educators as adult allies and mentors for the youth and teen ambassadors.Elementary schools provided fallow school gardens and the desire to cultivate the garden spaces and youth.Out-ofschool tutoring and homework support programs welcomed the academic enrichment for their students that the HLA program provided through the teens as teachers.

Strategic Planning
The planning process used information gleaned from the community assessment and capacity building steps to establish a plan of action.Here, the HLA program leadership team considered the steps needed to reach immediate goals and considered how to sustain those goals for the future.The resulting logic model incorporates youth development and health promotion principles that designate teens as instigators of change addressing a social need for community health.

Healthy Living Ambassador Program Logic Model
A logic model presents a conceptual map or pathway of how an effort or initiative is supposed to work and/or the logic of how change happens (Center for Community Health and Development, 2018).Logic models can be effective tools in rallying a community of participants together around an initiative to keep efforts moving in the same direction.Further, they have been used in many educational contexts, including community nutrition education (Medeiros et al., 2005;Scherr et al., 2014), youth development (Maslow et al., 2013;Wells & Arthur-Banning, 2008), and health promotion (Afifi, Makhoul, El Hajj, & Nakkash, 2011;Saunders, Evans, & Joshi, 2005;Steckler & Linnan, 2002).
The HLA program logic model (Figure 1) is built upon prior research in the public health and youth development fields.Specifically, we incorporated Lee and Murdock's (2001) essential elements for teen teachers (identified as E1 to E10 from Table 2) and the steps in SAMHSA's (2017) strategic planning framework.

Outputs, Outcomes, and Impacts
During the initial implementation of the garden program in the spring of 2014, we addressed the teens-as-teachers essential elements (Table 2) based on our available resources.We outline these areas in a series of tables and describe our key strategies and their resulting short-term outputs, outcomes, and impacts as addressed in the implementation and evaluation phases of our framework.Further, students could gain up to 40 hours of community service per season while participating in the program -an incentive, because community service hours are mandated and required at some schools to graduate high school.

Implementation
Tables 3 and 4 summarize our teen teacher and elementary student participant demographics.
The majority of youth who participated during the first two garden harvests (2014 and 2015) were Latino, while the majority group shifted in 2016 to Asian.While the overall program goal was maintained (to provide academically enriching experiences for both teen teachers and elementary children in the garden), the frequency and intensity of student activities changed through time to improve and meet multiple program outcome goals.
Tables 5 and 6 describe our teen teacher and elementary student participation.From year one (2014) of the program implementation to year three (2016), the amount of training hours for teen teachers increased (from 23 hours to 32 hours) as well as the frequency and duration of the weekly lessons teens delivered in the school gardens (from 6 weeks to 10 weeks, from one lesson/week to two lessons/week).Each year of the program, the HLA program widened its reach, adding a new school garden site each year (expanding from five school gardens to seven school gardens), while retaining the majority of school partnerships from the previous school years (only one school partnership was discontinued after the first year of program implementation).With the increased amount of time spent teaching in the garden, the number teens per team situated at each school garden also increased.In 2014, we had two to four teens per school garden team.By 2015, no team had fewer than four teen teachers per site.
When we increased to two lessons per week in 2016, our HLA garden teams had between six and eight teen teachers dedicated at each site.

Evaluation
During the evaluation step, we examined the challenges and successes of implementing the HLA program, which are presented in Tables 7 through 10.As the program evolved through 2015 and 2016, we identified that the 10 essential elements (Lee & Murdock, 2001; see Table 2) could be divided into four broad areas: (a) key personnel; (b) program curriculum and instruction essentials; (c) details, recognition, and teamwork; and (d) review, revise, and success.We collected information at every step to help us improve the effectiveness of the program.We integrated stakeholder feedback into our data collection process via observation, surveys, interviews, and by soliciting feedback from contributors at all levels (e.g., elementary students, teen teachers, program partners and staff, and volunteers) (Bolshakova et al., 2018).
By incorporating the stakeholder perspective, we were able to build program buy-in that contributed to community-level promotion of the program.Obtaining buy-in increased local interest that eventually led to securing additional funding from the county government and other youth-and health-focused organizations.
In Table 7, we identify key challenges and strategies for establishing key personnel as well as actions that showed promise as indicators of success (+) and aspects that remain a work in progress (-).
Table 7.In Table 8, we identify key challenges and strategies for establishing strong program curriculum and instructional methods, as well as actions that showed promise as indicators of success (+) and aspects that remain a work in progress (-).In Table 9, we highlight key challenges and strategies for accounting for the details, rewards, and recognition, and instilling a shared sense of team, as well as actions that showed promise as indicators of success (+) and aspects that remain a work in progress (-).In Table 10, we focus on key challenges and strategies for effectively evaluating and revising programmatic properties to set up teens for success, as well as actions that showed promise as indicators of success (+) and aspects that remain a work in progress (-).and practitioners note the value of using such a process (Arnold & Cater, 2016;Arnold & Nott, 2010).
All organizations involved in the HLA program benefited from the partnerships and focused effort around a need in the community: cultivating and sustaining school garden programming.
Elementary schools were excited to see school gardens revitalized, often after years of lying fallow, while after-school programs were happy to have the support of more enriching hands-on science activities for their students.The HLA program brought health, science, teen leadership, and teamwork together to grow teens' self-efficacy in their own health, all the while putting them at the forefront of promoting healthy behaviors in members of their local community.The teens-as-teachers model is known for producing positive changes in the teen participants (Weybright et al., 2016;Worker et al., 2018).
Culturally competent teen teachers were at the center of the program's ability to effectively engage young students from diverse communities.Our program's structure helped us overcome a major challenge experienced by youth development programs: that of supporting participation by low-income teens.We were able to identify challenges and strategies to overcome them, as well as track indicators of success and areas where continued focus is still needed.
We discuss several key lessons learned from addressing a community need by creating, implementing, and evaluating a collaborative teens-as-teachers after-school garden program in low-income communities.

Use a Logic Model to Guide Program Development
Harnessing multiple resources from key community partnerships was critical for the program's efficacy.Bringing multiple partners together around a common vision of healthy youth, teen leadership, and sustainable school gardens can be relatively simple.Developing a united community road map for getting to that vision can be more complex (Kaplan & Garrett, 2005).
So often, program development moves ahead of strategic planning in under-resourced and under-staffed environments.Lessons learned from other community-based program initiatives (such as the framework we used, SAMHSA, 2017) can be adapted to support local programmatic efforts.We dedicated essential time and space for strategic planning with multidisciplinary partners to co-develop a logic model to fit our needs locally and to guide our efforts conceptually (McLaughlin & Jordan, 1999;Saunders et al., 2005).
Logic models provide a clear and understandable framework that community partners can use to envision how the elements of a program work together (Wells & Arthur-Banning, 2008) and how their resources and expertise can most efficiently contribute to the overall goal.In coalition-type efforts, which are often essential in low-resourced environments, a plan with actionable steps is required to move program development forward.Our logic model provided all partners with guidance, direction, and transparency; provided a structure and parameters to work within; and provided the foundation of where we came from, where we were, and where we hoped to go.With a logic model in place, our implementation and evaluation efforts were more predictable and ran more smoothly, resulting in positive feedback and trust among partners that led to program buy-in and sustainability.
Teen ambassadors (HLAs) are key stakeholders in their community, and they provided important feedback to support the logic model's development (Brandon, 1998;Dwyer & Makin, 1997).Constructing a logic model with community input through an interactive and iterative process ensures local relevancy as well as supporting program feasibility and sustainability (Afifi et al., 2011).

Ensure Cultural Competence
One of the hardest parts of creating a successful program may be including cultural competency elements.Research by Outley and Witt (2006) shows that cultural competency is an intensive part of training (i.e., it is not something that can be taught with short, one-day trainings).
However, given the design of the HLA program, with teens mentoring youth in their own communities, the teens were innately, culturally competent in their ability to interact effectively with the diverse cultures of children from local elementary schools in their neighborhoods.Local teens with local experiences are keenly positioned to effectively connect, facilitate, and deliver positive, healthy leadership and behaviors by tapping into their individual aspects of geography, cultural identity, language, education, and age (Purnell, 2013).Yet, identifying contextually relevant curricula (in this case, garden-and project-based) and providing essential, effective training to teen teachers that is ongoing and sustained is essential.
In their roles as HLAs, teens provided elementary school children with culturally relevant leadership role models (Sánchez & Colón, 2005).Teens helping to revitalize fallow school gardens and lead lessons in the after-school programs provided both the necessary labor and examples of community leaders coming from similar social and economic backgrounds.
Teachers in the United States public elementary school system are predominantly white females (Taie & Goldring, 2017), while the HLAs' ethnic diversity more closely reflected the community they served and have been approximately 50% males.Teens not only provided role models for the younger children, but they began to open the door for their own future employment opportunities in health, education, and science.These benefits are similar to those found by other teens-as-teachers programs (Ponzio, Junge, Smith, Manglallan, & Peterson, 2000).

Address Barriers to Teens' Participation
Low socioeconomic status (SES) youth participation in after-school activities is lower than high SES youth (Pedersen & Seidman, 2004).Low income or SNAP-Ed eligible teens face many potential barriers to participation in demanding service-learning projects such as the HLA program.Often coming from families with immigrant parents, these teens may lack the same level or type of parental support for extracurricular projects that other teens benefit from (Mau, 1997;Perkins et al., 2007).The traditional 4-H model often relies on parents or other adult guardians to volunteer as mentors for teen projects.Children and teens in immigrant families often lack this level of support due to language and other barriers (Bohon, Macpherson, & Atiles, 2005).These families experience a level of role reversal with youth acting as translators for their parents and helping them to navigate the world (Orellana, Dorner, & Pulido, 2003); they must often independently pursue extracurricular activities, homework and college applications without parental guidance.It is also possible that extracurricular participation may be at odds with family responsibilities such as earning income or taking care of younger siblings (Perkins et al., 2007).Transportation barriers may compound teens' ability to participate (Gillard & Witt, 2008;Perkins et al., 2007), as their parents are often unable to transport them or pay for public transportation.
Nonetheless, because most already are leaders in their families, many low-SES adolescents are often also natural leaders in their communities when given support to overcome the identified barriers and challenges.Careful program planning positioned schools, community programs, and UCCE to assist many teens in the process for their participation.We identified UC CalFresheligible elementary schools that were near similarly qualifying high schools to help reduce the potential transportation barrier some teens may face.When needed, staff transported teens to trainings.Additionally, staff members served in the traditional 4-H parent volunteer or project leader role, facilitating teen lesson delivery and school garden revitalizations.Finally, to support teen teachers after participating in the HLA program, we provided documentation of volunteer hours, training, leadership opportunities, recognition, and letters of recommendation.

Conclusion
Using a process of intentional planning, implementation, and evaluation featuring youth as a central solution was critical to the development of this sustainable, community-based teens-asteachers program.Working across disciplines and programs provides multidisciplinary value and insight that cannot be gleaned from one perspective.Recognizing cultural context and cultural competency is valuable when creating sustainable long-term community programming.
Although our program focused on school gardens, both the logic model process and teens-asteachers model have the potential to be used in many settings.
Over the past five years(2013)(2014)(2015)(2016)(2017)(2018), we have been creating, supporting, and implementing the teens-as-teachers garden program to promote healthy behaviors in underserved communities.The original program, called Nutrition to Grow On, Energized!, began planning in the fall of 2013 in San Mateo County, and has since been renamed and rebranded as the Healthy Living Ambassador (HLA) program, now in San Mateo and San Francisco Counties.During the implementation phase, we initiated community activities and record keeping.As we continued, details emerged about the challenges and strategies of program implementation that were critical to the program's desired impacts and sustainability.Throughout the entire process, our team was constantly evaluating to address the challenges that arose.While some concepts related to supporting this program flourished in our community, others required modifications to maximize their effect.Engaging Culturally Competent, Local YouthTeen recruitment focused on local teens, particularly in underserved communities.We made a concerted effort to include diversity representative of the local community, which included teens outside typical 4-H demographics.By focusing on local teens in the neighborhoods and high schools in close proximity to the elementary school gardens, we were able to recruit some teens that had previously attended the same elementary schools and therefore related with common cultural norms.We met and developed relationships with local youth workers and educators, and integrated our staff into classrooms and meeting spaces.We found many teens looking for leadership and skill development opportunities.The concept of giving back to younger students in their community and having their own space (the garden) to work together appealed to many teens.Transportation was provided when needed (e.g., to the training at UC Elkus Ranch); however, the goal was to have students locally placed in elementary school gardens within walking distance of their high school or home to eliminate the transportation barrier.
Established clearer roles for the teens (teachers), adult volunteers or Cooperative Extension staff (mentors/allies), and afterschool program staff (classroom managers) Increased number of teen teacher teammates at each site (from 2-3 teens in 2014 to 6-8 in 2016) and the number of program days per week (from 1

Table 2 . Ten Essential Elements of Teens as Teachers
The UCCE collaboration and partnership with community stakeholders led to the development of the HLA program in San Mateo and San Francisco Counties.The 4-H Youth Development Program provided expertise in training and program implementation with positive youth development and youth volunteer program management dimensions.The UC CalFresh program provided nutrition education expertise, community partnerships with schools, and nutrition These partners included 4-H Youth Development, UC CalFresh (California's Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program Education [SNAP-Ed] program) and EFNEP, UC Elkus Ranch Environmental Education Center, and Master Gardeners, and our community stakeholders (e.g., schools, out-of-school programs).With the 4-H Youth Development program's goal to expand the reach and diversity of youth, and the UC CalFresh program's goal to provide comprehensive nutrition education programming to schools with at least 50% of their students eligible for free or reduced-price school meals, we incorporated serving a diverse audience, with most of youth coming from low-income neighborhoods.

Table 6 . Number of Elementary Children Participating in HLA Garden Program Year Number of elementary children reached Number of gardens Program duration Program hours | approximate minutes per lesson
HLAs gained extensive access to a network of people, knowledge, and resources along the continuum from local community to the university, helping open pathways to colleges and careers.
opportunities to participate in other UCCE programming such as Connecting Youth to Nature day camps held at UC Elkus Ranch.With these added opportunities, HLAs were "Leaders in Training," assisting in leading hands-on lessons in environmental science, nutrition, and physical activity through a high quality outdoor educational experience.Through these experiences,