Adults with disabilities still have important difficulties to access attractive and high-quality training offers; most of them need a very practical approach, minimizing the theoretical contents to avoid drop-outs and lack of motivation. Following a training with a concrete aim, as for instance find a job or help other people, can make a difference for a person with disability to successfully complete a learning course. It is worthy to remind that people with disabilities are experts by experience in recovery. They have received treatments and cares to improve their wellbeing for long time, even years. Now, we want to reverse the roles, we want people with disabilities to be in charge of providing green care to other people. We want them to create green and friendly environments that enhance good mental health and physical condition improvement. For people being receiving cares for long, it is very gratifying to be «on the other side», meaning being the ones who help, who mark the positive turning point in others’ lives.
HEALING GARDENER is a training program on therapeutic gardening addressed to people with different disabilities to learn how to stablish a healing garden and the benefits that the nature brings in our lives. The gardens are stablished in Spain, Greece, Germany and Lithuania during a learning by doing training course in the rehabilitation centres where the participants receive treatment or in public spaces where they can benefit the whole society. Thus, the learners actively participate in the creation of another rehabilitation tool for other people attending to these places, being part of an enriching co-created process to increase the wellbeing of their communities. Thanks to this project, we are not only providing gardening training to a concrete number of participants, but offer an innovative learning and therapeutic space for all the clients of the partners’ organizations in a near future.
