Social Work’s Applegate Advocates for the Benefit of Community Gardens

By Barbara Jester

      Recipient of the Silver School of Social Work’s Innovation in Social Work Practice Student Award, Jennifer Applegate graduates today with a master’s degree in social work.
      Applegate grew up outside of Seattle, Washington, and became interested in psychology and human behavior while taking college courses in high school. During a study tour to Northern Ireland while an undergraduate at Whitworth University in Spokane, she witnessed the effects of political and religious oppression and decided to pursue a career in social work.
      While at NYU, she interned in an HIV/AIDS clinic, doing intake assessments and individual counseling. But her special passion is community gardens.
      “My parents are very green,” says Applegate, who is also co-chair of Sustainable Silver, a group working to make the Silver School a more environmentally aware and responsible institution.
      When Applegate moved to the East Coast, she got involved with the Greater Newark Conservancy in New Jersey, where she worked with high school students to create a garden—complete with flowers, vegetables, plants, and a pond—in the middle of Newark. The project also included classes for community members, along with hearing, smelling, and tasting gardens, catering to those with developmental challenges.
      Applegate’s passion for community gardens led to her social work research project in which she completed a comprehensive review, examining how they have been shown to lessen violence, improve health outcomes, and facilitate social participation in neighborhoods. She believes that gardens bring people together, not just in the physical act of planting, but later on as the community watches the plants and flowers grow.
      “Soon people are sharing crops, exchanging recipes, and holding barbecues,” she says.
      Applegate’s project has led to a research proposal—a five-year, longitudinal study comparing neighborhoods with and without community gardens in the city of Newark. After graduation, she hopes to get involved with a Bellevue Hospital project, the Sobriety Garden, where substance abuse patients work, and she will continue her volunteer work as an advocate for domestic violence victims in New York Presbyterian Hospital’s emergency room.