Delivering Urban Wellbeing through Transformative Social Enterprise

Researcher(s)

Kelly Dombroski
Gradon Diprose
Stephen Healy
David Conradson

Project Location

Christchurch, New Zealand

The project “Delivering Urban Wellbeing through Transformative Community Enterprise” aims to explore the work of Cultivate, a community enterprise that uses the common spaces of two urban farms transform green waste from restaurants into rich soil and high quality fresh produce. This produce is then sold back to local restaurants, supported by and supporting youth interns. The project explores the conditions which enabled Cultivate, and document and measure the transformative social and environmental outcomes of Cultivate. We experiment with developing a usable version of the Community Economy Return on Investment (CEROI) tool for assessing whether the inputs or investments into the project are 'worth it'.

Our project is funded through the New Zealand Government's National Science Challenge 11: Building Better Homes, Towns and Cities, one of 11 Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment-funded Challenges aimed at taking a more strategic approach to science investment.

Kitchen garden image