Delivering Urban Wellbeing through Transformative Community Enterprise

This report summarises the research and explains how we developed and used a ‘Community Economy Return on Investment’ tool to document and measure the transformative social and environmental outcomes of the urban farm Cultivate Christchurch. Cultivate is the site in which effort, relationships, money and materials are brought together. It is a site which produces a significant amount of food, but its benefits also extend to changed lives, changed relationships, and a more positive sense of Christchurch as a post-disaster city. These returns on Cultivate’s activities are not captured by notions of profit, ‘savings from helping young people to avoid the justice system’, or even the production of ‘good workers for the economy’. Instead, they might be described as ‘something more’.