Designing a therapeutic community garden to support mental health, food security, and social cohesion in Za'atari refugee camp.
What are the most effective strategies for providing sustainable and culturally sensitive mental health care in refugee camps?
Forced to escape their home countries because of conflict, persecution, or disaster, refugees undergo a fundamentally traumatizing journey often marked with violence, loss, and fear. Among the 110 million people forcibly displaced worldwide, 6.6 million continue to live within the harsh realities of refugee camps — overcrowded, resource-scarce environments that exacerbate mental health-related traumas.
These conditions, combined with the trauma of previous experiences, make most refugees prone to psychological effects such as anxiety, depression, and PTSD. The Community Garden Project seeks to increase access to — and improve the cultural appropriateness of — mental health care offered in refugee camps.
The provision includes counselling, psychotherapy, and psychiatric treatment alongside improved prevention services that focus on resilience and capacity-building. The project also ensures a sustainable model of care through training community workers to provide basic mental health support, and leverages technology to overcome resource limitations.
Za'atari refugee camp in Jordan is one of the world's largest and most complex humanitarian settings, with over 79,000 registered Syrian refugees. The camp involves a wide array of mental health challenges and provides rich context for in-depth study and intervention development.
The varied demographic profile — which includes a significant number of children and youth — provides an opportunity to study mental health across age groups and backgrounds. Research on the effects of COVID-19 on younger refugees further indicates Za'atari as a site where testing mental health interventions can be done most effectively.
The core challenge: how do you design an intervention that addresses mental health, food security, skill development, and community building simultaneously — within the constraints of a refugee camp environment?
The process began with extensive secondary research across three critical domains: mental health in refugee camps, the therapeutic benefits of community gardens, and peer-to-peer learning in humanitarian settings.
The research revealed that refugees in Za'atari — particularly in the context of COVID-19 — face significant mental health challenges. The pandemic exacerbated existing issues among Syrian refugees, leading to worsening conditions due to factors like financial difficulties, family conflicts, and limited access to care hindered by shortages of professionals and medication.
Community gardens provide substantial benefits for both mental and physical health. Research has shown that gardeners exhibit significantly better self-esteem, mental health, and reduced depression, with notable stress improvements after gardening sessions. These gardens emerge as pivotal spaces blending physical health enhancement with mental wellness and community connectivity.
A comprehensive stakeholder map was developed to understand the full ecosystem of actors involved — from refugees and camp staff at the core, to NGOs, government bodies, UN agencies, and broader local Jordanian communities.
An anonymous survey was conducted within the Za'atari camp to understand the relationship between time spent in the camp, mental well-being, and perception of missing services. A key finding: those who had remained in the camp over five years reported significantly higher levels of stress, anxiety, and chronic psychological malaise — revealing how deeply displacement cumulatively affects mental health.
The survey also highlighted critical gaps: a pronounced need for enhanced healthcare services, comprehensive educational programs for children and adults, and improved community-based activities and leisure facilities for social interaction.
From this research, an initial model for the community garden was developed around eight key design principles:
The Community Garden Project — named "Community Roots" — delivers a holistic intervention that operates across four interconnected rationales, each reinforcing the others to create lasting impact.
The program engages the therapeutic aspects of nature, reflecting evidence-based practice showing that gardening can help alleviate symptoms of mental health disorders. Through integrating cognitive therapy spaces, the initiative caters to the psychological needs of refugees, providing a natural escape where both structured sessions and informal mindfulness can combine.
Volunteers and local professionals were engaged in designing the garden to ensure effectiveness and real-world impact. Their feedback shaped an extended implementation strategy built around three pillars:
By embedding purpose, healing, and community into a single space, the Community Garden Project positions itself not just as an agricultural intervention — but as a model for holistic humanitarian design that addresses mental health, social cohesion, food security, and economic empowerment simultaneously.