The effects of organizations engaging residents in greening vacant lots: Insights from a United States national survey

Abstract

BackgroundAs vacant lot inventories expand in cities across the U.S., vacant land management organizations require strategies that optimize their functioning while ensuring community benefit. Resident engagement in programs to green vacant land may be one helpful strategy. While resident engagement is often required for vacant land management organizations, few researchers have examined how these organizations engage residents and the effect of these practices on their functioning. We hypothesized that more intensive engagement such as involving residents in planning and implementing greening would be more predictive of organizational functioning than lower level engagement. MethodsWe analyzed data from a national survey of vacant land management organizations from 27 states (N = 68). We assessed three areas of organizational functioning including networking, programmatic, and resource capacity. We used hierarchical regression to test the additive effects of the resident engagement predictor variables including communication, input, involvement in planning, and involvement in implementation on organizational functioning. ResultsLess intensive engagement forms such as communicating and soliciting input were the most popular methods, but our final model indicated that the highest functioning organizations reported the most resident involvement in planning and implementing greening. ConclusionsOur results support policies and practices that expand resident involvement in greening.