University of Arizona
EN-10: Community Partnerships

The UA Community and School Garden Program is an internship-based course centered in the School of Geography and Development. The course provides the opportunity for motivated and self-directed UA students to participate in the growing school garden movement. School gardens are innovative and powerful educational tools for exploring local ecologies, nutrition, the culture and politics of food, and practical life skills not limited to horticulture. Students are trained by staff from the Community Food Bank Food Resource Center School Gardening Program and supervised by a field coordinator and faculty member to assist a Tucson school with a garden and gardening education or to support a community garden in one of Tucson's neighborhoods. Students are eligible for internship credit that can range from 2-6 units. Each unit of credit represents 50 hours a semester of involvement which translates into about 3 hours of internship per week. The internship includes the opportunity to engage with students, teachers, and community members around the design and maintenance of a garden as well as weekly class meetings around garden-related readings, videos, films, and group discussion.

The University of Arizona through the land grant mission has fostered many collaborative partnerships that address sustainability issues. One partnership in particular to note is the Compost Cats agreements with the surrounding businesses and nonprofit organizations. Compost Cats works with 15 businesses and nonprofits collecting compostable waste to be transformed in high quality compost. The compost is then used on campus, by the community food bank, and the San Xavier Coop Farm. The rest is sold to interested businesses and people at competitive rates. This partnership started in January 2011 by a group of motivated students and has progressively grown larger to incorporate businesses, government and nonprofit organizations. The University has supported the growth of Compost Cats through the awarding of UA Green Fund grant funding, funding a half-time staff coordinator, and providing other administrative support for the program. In 2015, the University signed a 3-year intergovernmental agreement with the City of Tucson, where the City of Tucson is investing $66,000 annually to help sustain Compost Cats. This is allowing the City to bundle food waste composting into their waste services for food-related businesses. This intensification of partnership has helped the program grow from approximately 300,000 pounds of organic waste diversion in 2011 to an estimated 4.5 million pounds for 2016 as these business arrangements continue to grow.

Through years of collaborative work by the Renewable Energy Network at UA in partnership with the community and Tucson Electric Power, as well as the UA TechPark's Solar Zone that is the largest multi-platform solar research installation in the US, UA has been a leader in community engagement around energy and climate issues for some time.

More recently, President Hart signed the new Climate Commitment by Second Nature, committing UA to working closely with the community toward climate adaptation and mitigation planning. Two UA staff/scientists have been elected to the Tucson Climate Change Committee, which advises the Mayor and City Council on climate issues, and is working toward more comprehensive climate commitments and plans on the part of the City. This will be a multi-year effort, but there are many ways the UA can work collaboratively toward long-term transformative solutions to the climate and energy challenges of Tucson, and these areas of overlap will be a continued focus of the university climate planning efforts. As a nationally ranked environmental research institution, the University of Arizona has many partnerships that go beyond the immediate community. One such organization that has been creating partnerships that impact distant communities is the Climate Assessment for the Southwest (CLIMAS). CLIMAS is actively engaging communities across the western United States, tribal nations, and the US-Mexico border region. CLIMAS develops tools and reports around the themes of adaptation and vulnerability, climate science, communication of science, decision support, drought, economics and livelihoods, ecosystems, health and water. These reports and tools are being developed STARS Reporting Tool | AASHE Snapshot | Page 76 for specific communities as well as for the region as a whole, and are integral to increasing the capacity of communities to adapt to climate change, deal with drought and make decisions based upon actionable science. For more information about CLIMAS, check out www.climas.arizona.edu

Updated February 2016