School gardens are an ideal space to deliver a healthy living curriculum, such as nutrition and physical activity education, to elementary school youth. However, public schools often lack the resources and support to establish sustainable garden-based programming. We created the Healthy Living Ambassador program, a collaborative after-school garden program in low-income communities that brought together resources from schools, community programs, and University of California Cooperative Extension. This school garden program featured culturally competent teens as teachers to serve as near-peer educators and mentors to elementary school youth. The program development model incorporated lessons from sustainable community-based health program interventions and essential elements of teens-as-teachers programs. We share the program logic model and discuss the successes and challenges of this program model that we encountered while developing a long-term, maintainable community garden program to teach healthy living.

One foundation of trust-building is demonstrating that key program staff and leaders have an interest in and understanding of the local landscape of Latin@diversity…" (Erbstein and Fabionar 2014) 4-H FACT SHEET SERIESBuilding Partnerships with the Latino Community: Fact Sheet For 4-h StaFF the reality UC ANR understands the following: • University Cooperative Extension in the United States has an obligation as a recipient of federal funds to engage Latino and ethnic minority youth in the 4-H Youth Development Program (YDP).

The RealiTy UC ANR understands the following:• Positive youth development programs present an important opportunity to support ethnic and racial identity of Latino youth development.