2009 One undergraduate intern, one UA faculty member, one high school teacher, one high school class, and the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona collaborate to support a school garden at Project More Charter High School.
2010 Ten students are trained in garden maintenance, sustainable food production, and food systems politics support school gardens at Project More, Ochoa Elementary, Manzo Elementary, and Borton Elementary.
2011 Twenty-two students support the previous school gardens, minus Project More, adding Drachman Montessori Magnet and community gardens Tucson Village Farm and Las Milpitas to the list of placement sites.
2012 The Community and School Garden Workshop, a formal UA class, is offered by instructors, Sallie Marston and Sarah Moore. The course trains interns to learn to design and implement significant projects for their placement sites such as writing children’s books on gardening, developing planting calendars or offering science literacy projects with another site.
2014 Approximately 50 interns per semester are placed in our partner sites which that year also included the Community Gardens of Tucson, Rincon Heights Community Garden, The Wildcat School (now closed) and Roskruge K-8 School.
2015 The SGW team adds Moses Thompson, a coordinator between the UA and TUSD, whose efforts support teachers to use school gardens for both healthy eating and learning. The Community and School Garden Workshop course is cross listed in ten different units spanning five colleges. Donors and private foundations begin to provide support for training teachers to use the gardens for experiential learning, expand infrastructure, link school sites to real world science experiments, and enable UA students to engage more directly and effectively with the Tucson community.
2016 The GUEST (Gardening and Urban Ecology Support for Teachers) Program was launched with Morgan Apicella as the program coordinator. GUEST brings the SGW teacher training model to schools that are too far for UA interns to support. The SEEC (Supporting Environment, Education and Community) Program was launched with Michelle Coe as the program coordinator. SEEC trains teachers and students to participate in hands on science, social science and art learning and enables them to collaborate with researchers at the UA and in the Tucson community.
2017 SGW increases its capacity and serves eighteen underserved schools in the Tucson Unified School District, 2 in the Sunnyside Unified School District, and three community gardens.
2018 Agrivoltaic (AV) garden is launched at Manzo Elementary School through collaboration with researcher Greg Barron-Gafford (Biosphere 2, School of Geography and Development). Rebecca Renteria joins the GUEST Program.
2019 The SGW team adds Jessie Rack (SEEC Program Coordinator), Tammy Larson (GUEST Program Coordinator), and Rachel Wehr (Lead Field Coordinator and Program Manager) to the team. The program altogether serves 24 schools and 3 community sites participating in garden-related programming.