What Motivates Iowa Master Gardeners?

The Master Gardener program is a nationwide volunteer program providing community service as an extension of Land Grant University’s outreach mission. Although the mission of the program is to disseminate research-based garden education to their communities, this group has been shown to have altruistic as well as personal motivations. Individuals volunteer time for a variety of broad categories including values, understanding, social, career, protective, and enhancement (Clary et al., 1998). Previous work by Schrock et al. (2000) found Master Gardeners to have a strong tendency for the values and understanding categories, meaning they like to help others and want education for personal use. The objective of this study was to determine Iowa Master Gardener’s motivations for volunteering in the program. An anonymous survey was sent electronically to more than 3700 active and former Iowa Master Gardeners with more than 1200 responses recorded. The survey remained open for nearly two months with two follow-up reminders. Questions were divided into two broad categories, personal gain and community engagement. Responses were ranked on a 5-point Likert scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Results show that questions relating to individual rewards ranked higher than those relating to strengthening community. Specifically, more than 98% of respondents agree or strongly agree that the program provides opportunity to learn about plants, soils, and horticultural topics. Also 93% agree or strongly agree that the program provides classroom instruction and hands-on experience in horticulture. Master Gardeners are less likely to agree or strongly agree that the Master Gardener program will alleviate some societal problems (30%) and that influential people in their community are Master Gardeners (24%). Master Gardener volunteers show greater contribution when they become more experienced and familiar with the program (Ruppert et al., 1997). These data provide rationale for expanding the curriculum in order to keep the interest, and therefore retention, of this educationally driven group.