After leading a recovery garden program in Jefferson County for four years, the Horticulture Agent reached out to Extension Specialists at UK Community and Leadership Development to help develop a plan to move the current recovery program into a self-sustaining model. The initial conversation lead to the idea of developing a Toolkit for Extension professionals and recovery centers to help them develop or transition a recovery garden program into one that is eventually managed primarily by the recovery center. After the initial conversation, the Hort agent plus Extension Specialists from CLD; the Food System Specialist with NEP and Addiction Recovery Specialist with NEP talked about the idea and decided to share it with other Horticulture Agents and NEP assistants currently working with addiction recovery centers.

The result is a task-force of 4 Horticulture Agents and 3 NEP Assistants, plus the above mentioned Extension Specialists, who all support gardens at addiction recovery centers who are collectively writing a toolkit for Extension Professionals and Recovery Centers on best-practices for implementing a recovery garden program. The goal is over the next year to create a toolkit that allows for the easy use of cross-programmatic resources (Horticulture and NEP) by Extension Professionals that they can use to help build partnerships with their local recovery center(s) to implement supplemental addiction recovery programming in Kentucky using Cooperative Extension Resources.