EYES FORWARD
🌱 Arizona Garden Month 2026
A Growing Movement Rooted in Healing, Heritage, and Hope
A Civic Invitation to Cultivate Community, Justice, and Regeneration
🌸 In April 2025, something beautiful took root in Arizona.
What began as a grassroots vision—planted by veterans, educators, policymakers, gardeners, and global allies—blossomed into the inaugural, statewide observance of Arizona Garden Month.
Signed by Governor Katie Hobbs, unanimously affirmed by Pima County and the City of Tucson, and championed by diverse community leaders, this new tradition didn’t just honor plants.
It honored people. It honored purpose. It honored possibility.
🌿 Gardening doesn’t just grow food.
It grows healing.
It grows belonging.
It grows resilience.
As we prepare to cultivate Arizona Garden Month 2026, we invite you—policymakers, educators, healthcare workers, veterans, artists, youth leaders, and neighbors—to grow with us.
🧠 Why Arizona Garden Month Matters
Arizona Garden Month is more than a proclamation.
It is a living civic platform—a new public tradition rooted in:
🌱 Mental & Emotional Health
Gardens ground us. For veterans, youth, caregivers, and trauma survivors, time in the soil becomes time to heal. Gardening restores rhythm, connection, and agency—powerful tools for navigating PTSD, anxiety, and grief.
As Rep. Stacey Travers wrote in her legislative proclamation:
“Gardening offers a peaceful, non-threatening environment in which to process experiences… and helps promote a sense of belonging and support to combat isolation.”
🌱 Ecological Resilience
Through pollinator gardens, compost systems, and native planting, communities are restoring biodiversity, honoring traditional ecological knowledge, and building climate resilience block by block.
🌱 Food Sovereignty
In neighborhoods where grocery stores are scarce, gardens become lifelines. Community gardens push back against food deserts and empower residents with tools of self-reliance, dignity, and collective stewardship.
🌱 Education & Cultural Memory
Gardens are outdoor classrooms and sacred spaces. They teach science and nutrition—and also transmit ancestral knowledge, reconnecting youth to their roots and elders to their purpose.
🌻 What We Grew in 2025: A Civic Harvest
✅ State Proclamation – Governor Katie Hobbs declared April 2025 Arizona Garden Month
✅ Local Resolutions – Unanimous support from Pima County and the City of Tucson
✅ Cross-Sector Activation – Engagement from educators, healthcare workers, veterans, tribal leaders, and international allies
✅ Veteran Testimony That Moved the Room
“He didn’t kill himself, like so many others who never found their release.
He died in his garden. He had projects. He had plans. He had love.
And we told each other: ‘I love you.’”
🌍 Global Roots – Partners connected Arizona Garden Month to global themes of post-conflict healing, sustainable peace, and food security.
🧠 Legislative Impact – Arizona lawmakers formally recognized gardening as a therapeutic intervention—especially for veterans with PTSD—laying the groundwork for future public health and education policy.
🌼 Why You Should Get Involved in 2026
Whether you're a soil geek, school principal, state senator, or spiritual leader, there's a role for you in this growing ecosystem.
You can:
✔️ Co-sponsor a proclamation in your city, county, school board, or tribal nation
✔️ Host seed swaps, garden builds, art shows, harvest feasts, or neighborhood cleanups
✔️ Support gardens in schools, jails, veterans homes, shelters, or vacant lots
✔️ Advance policies on composting, urban agriculture, therapeutic horticulture, or water equity
✔️ Share your story: What has gardening meant to you?
📍 A “For Fellows, By Fellows” Civic Innovation Model
Arizona Garden Month began as a grassroots call for healing—led by veterans and nurtured into policy through civic collaboration.
Now, it serves as a statewide model for:
Veteran wellness through therapeutic horticulture
Local food justice and community agriculture
Intergenerational education and ecological repair
Civic engagement rooted in lived experience
The Flinn-Brown Invitation
We invite Fellows across Arizona to co-cultivate this tradition.
Let’s explore together:
🔹 A Flinn-Brown Civic Spotlight or roundtable on gardens as civic infrastructure
🔹 Cross-sector collaboration across education, justice, climate, healthcare, and the arts
🔹 A statewide toolkit for replicating garden-based civic engagement
🔹 Local Fellow-led initiatives to plant gardens where they’re needed most
“Civic leadership isn’t just about solving problems.
It’s about planting solutions that grow across generations.”
🌍 Arizona Garden Month Embodies the Flinn-Brown Vision
Arizona Garden Month is not just a civic win—it’s a living demonstration of the Flinn-Brown Fellowship’s mission in action.
Here’s how it aligns with the program’s core pillars:
🔷 Expand Capacity to Address Arizona’s Long-Term Issues
Tackles root challenges like PTSD, food insecurity, water justice, and social disconnection
Offers long-term solutions grounded in health, sustainability, and civic empowerment
🔷 Encourage Public Service and Civic Engagement
Brings together lawmakers, veterans, educators, healthcare workers, and community leaders
Transforms passive residents into active stewards of their neighborhoods
🔷 Build a Statewide Civic Network
Fellows and allies from across Arizona are invited to adopt, adapt, and expand the model
Creates space for local ownership while advancing a shared statewide identity
🔷 Advance Nonpartisan Leadership
Gardening transcends ideology—it’s practical, cultural, and human
Engages diverse political and generational perspectives around a shared mission
✍️ Let’s Grow Arizona—Together
In an age of disconnection, gardening reconnects us—to land, to purpose, to each other.
It’s bipartisan. Cross-cultural. Intergenerational. Universal.
Arizona Garden Month is a seed.
What we’re growing is a civic ecosystem—for remembrance, regeneration, and resilience.
📅 Suggested Next Steps for the Flinn-Brown Network
🔹 Invite Fellows to appear in a “Two Fellows, One Garden” blog or video
🔹 Feature Garden Month in Flinn’s Civic Leadership Council or newsletter
🔹 Host a Flinn-Brown panel: “From Seeds to Systems: Cultivating Civic Leadership through Arizona Garden Month”
🔹 Distribute a Garden Month Civic Toolkit with policy, programming, and proclamation templates
🔹 Offer mini-grants for local healing and sustainability projects inspired by Garden Month
🌿 In Closing
Gardening is not a metaphor—it’s a method.
It’s how we rebuild trust,
how we mourn,
how we begin again.
It’s how we serve those who served,
and honor those too often forgotten.
Arizona Garden Month is more than an event.
It’s a civic healing model. And it’s only just begun.
So meet us in the garden.
Let’s grow healing.
Let’s grow remembrance.
Let’s grow something enduring—together.
#ArizonaGardenMonth2026
#BurnSlowDoctrine
#GrowAZ
#FromCombatToCompost
