Growing Social Change in Community Green Spaces
Content

When her grandfather taught her how to compost and grow food as a child in her family's garden in rural New Jersey, Trisha Dehrone, PhD student in Psychological & Brain Sciences, didn't realize she would one day be using green spaces to also grow social change.
But that is exactly what she is trying to do through an ongoing project in Tennessee, where Dehrone is working with a local parks nonprofit to bring different groups of people together to plant flowers and build benches.
Public parks are often touted for their environmental conservation value, but Dehrone’s training in social psychology helped her to see them as much more. Learning that nonprofits often struggle to bring people together across lines of difference, Dehrone remembered her childhood experiences with gardening and realized these green spaces could offer a solution. In addition to being a space to gather, parks lend themselves to community activities where people can work cooperatively towards a shared goal, such as by building playgrounds and benches, and other community beautification projects.

Earlier this year, Dehrone and her advisor, Dr. Linda Tropp, co-authored a free and practical guide for non-profits called “Cultivating Contact: A Guide to Building Bridges and Meaningful Connections Between Groups,” distilling insights from decades of social psychological research on how to build relationships across lines of difference. While meeting with several non-profits around the country to share insights from this guide, Dehrone connected with a parks non-profit that was re-imagining parks as a place to meet their neighbors and build community—which is how she ended up in Tennessee working on the bench-building project.
Dehrone and another graduate student in the lab, Liora Morhayim, have traveled to Tennessee several times this past year to see this community-building happen in real time and survey participants about their experiences. Data collection is still ongoing and so the effectiveness of the project has yet to be determined, but Dehrone hopes that the social psychology-informed programming helps participants build meaningful relationships.
Reflecting back on what led her into this type of work, Dehrone recalls several key experiences. She had been interested in psychology for as long as she can remember, but it wasn't until college that she got to know people from different backgrounds and lived experiences. After growing up in a small homogeneous community, these interactions opened her eyes to the ways a person's social identities impacted how they experienced the world around them.
As she searched for a career that would "make some more good in the world," Dehrone gained experience at both small and large scales—working first on local community service projects as an AmeriCorps Team Leader, then on Department of Justice and immigration casework as an Intern at the White House. Reading through Americans’ stories to then President Obama, Dehrone found herself asking why psychology was not being used to inform policy and address the concerns they raised. She saw a need to put our scientific understanding of human behavior into practice.
Motivated to help bridge social divides, Dehrone joined the Psychology of Peace and Violence Program at UMass Amherst. As a member of Dr. Tropp's Intergroup Relations and Social Justice Lab, Dehrone researches how members of different social groups interact with each other and the consequences of these interactions.

Dehrone was awarded the highly competitive National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship in 2019, which supported her work for three years. She was also the recipient of NSF Supplemental Internship Funding in 2021, the International Society of Political Psychology Summer Academy Fellowship in 2020, and the UMass Edna M. Dahlquist Scholarship in 2019.
Looking to the future, Dehrone hopes to demonstrate to nonprofit organizations that psychology research can be useful. Many technology companies have already begun hiring psychologists to increase employee productivity or improve customer experience, for example. However, nonprofit groups have yet to regularly seek out social psychologists to join their teams. Dehrone sees tremendous potential for improved social outcomes when government institutions, nonprofits, and psychologists can work together and learn from each other.
Reflecting on her experiences, Dehrone says "I'm learning just as much from my community partners as they're hopefully learning from me and my research." She has already done much to prepare fertile ground in which these partnerships can continue. When psychologists and community groups work together, green spaces can indeed grow social change.
Written by Jacob Barnett, PhD Candidate in Organismic & Evolutionary Biology, as part of the Graduate School's Public Writing Fellows Program.