Proposal, Objectives & Achievements

Proposal, Objectives & Achievements

Weekly Objectives and Achievements:

“Every successful individual knows that his or her achievement depends on a community of persons working together.”- Paul Ryan

The long-term objective of our project is to facilitate connections between Vancouver farmers’ markets and local non-profit organizations in providing food programs to marginalized populations. By partnering with Health Initiatives for Men and the Dr. Peter Centre, we will be working with Vancouver’s West End LGBTQ+ community, refugees and immigrants, and individuals living with HIV/AIDS. The purpose of our project is to determine which community stakeholders will be involved and what infrastructure would need to be developed to make this a feasible and sustainable project. For a detailed explanation of our project, please see our Project Proposal.

Achievements by Week:

  • Sept 12th – 18th: Formed our group
  • Sept 19th – 25th: Finished first blog post; Entire group met with Josh
  • Sept 26th – Oct 2nd: TCPS due date
  • Oct 3rd – 9th: Drafted, finalized and submitted our Project Proposal

General Achievements Thus Far:

  • Regular, genuinely enthusiastic group meetings
  • Every group member attended the meeting with our community partner
  • Everyone completed the TCPS certification

Objectives:

  • Oct 10th -16th: Set up meetings with Dr. Peter Centre and farmers market
  • Oct 17th – 23rd: Develop informational survey and interview questions by Wednesday; Meet with community partners
  • Oct 24th – 30th: Survey and interview farmers at the farmers’ market
  • Oct 31 – Nov 6th: Discuss survey results with community partners; Blog 3 due Nov 6th
  • Nov 7th – 13th: Have all data collected and summarized
  • Nov 14th – 20th: Rough draft of Final Project
  • Nov 21st – 27th: Blog 4 due Nov 27th, Final Project Presentation due Nov 27th
  • Nov 28th – Dec 4th: Final Project Due Dec 4th.

Moment of Significance

“Some moments are nice, some are nicer, some are even worth writing about.” -Charles Bukowski

Meeting with Josh Edward

What: The meeting with our main community partner, Josh Edward from HIM (Health Initiatives for Men), was the most significant moment up until this point. We met with Josh at HIM’s main office to discuss the project, resources and contacts available to us. The baseline information on the project from the course was vague, and going into the meeting, we did not have a clear understanding of our project goal. Josh expressed his goal and long-term vision for the project, while highlighting how our group will participate in the project. He explained the missions of Health Initiative for Men and of the Dr. Peter Centre, and then explained that he hopes we will discover a network of farmers who are willing to donate a quota of produce to enable the Dr. Peter Centre to provide three free meals a day instead of two, at least during the growing season. He explained that he hopes this will create a model for food redistribution systems that can then be applied to support other licensed NGOs providing meal programing to marginalized communities in Vancouver such as Rainbow Soup Kitchen and Rainbow Refugees.

So What: This meeting was significant because it gave us a greater understanding of the project and instilled us with motivation and a positive outlook. By having more community contacts, we are able to initiate conversations with the people who run and use the existing food programs that we will be working with. Such conversations are significant because they will allow us to draw connections by listening to multiple perspectives and recognizing and respecting experiential knowledge (Bradley & Herrera, 2016). Incorporating multiple perspectives when working towards a solution is beneficial because it enables the task to be approached from multiple viewpoints; thereby, allowing us to identify complications that may be missed or deliver insights that may not have been realized. Learning from our stakeholder’s experiential knowledge will be imperative to developing a sustainable framework for food redistribution. Understanding how stakeholders’ organizations and farms work and understanding their history and present work will enable us to develop an appropriate framework that fits into their existing programming and business models. Moreover, gaining this insight will be the first step towards creating an asset-based community development project, as we aim to connect and empower existing food-assets within our community. Asset-based community development, or ABCD, is an alternate means of improving communities, focusing on utilizing and expanding on the existing strengths of a community instead of identifying weaknesses and faults in the community and attempting to “fix” them with external inputs (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003).

Now What: Using the contacts that Josh provided, we are able to confidently reach out to community partners and collect necessary data, insights, and other information. We have a diversity of disciplines represented in our group, including dietetics, nutritional sciences, Indigenous health, food market analysis and agricultural science majors. As Vogt and Goldman (2016) state, such diversity is important as it informs solutions to problems from multiple perspectives. Going forward, we will split our group into two teams based on common interests within our disciplines and connecting with community partners who share similar passions.

We will begin developing viable options for redistributing left-over foods from farmers markets through the existing community organizations. We are outsiders in this situation, and admittedly have minimal understanding of the organization at this point in time. Our goal is to first learn from the people working at and using the Dr. Peter Centre and then have them direct the project using the resources we have available. As Sirolli (2012) suggests, we as academics have a special role within the food system, we have been given the opportunity to sit and listen to the community partners and work towards their goals for the community.

Upcoming Objectives and Strategies

“Without strategy, execution is aimless. Without execution, strategy is useless.” – Morris Chang

  1. Develop informational interview questions: Identify qualitative and quantitative questions to assess the willingness of farmers to donate left-over food to our community partners as well as a set of qualitative and quantitative questions to assess the recipients needs and existing assets.
  2. Connect with community partners: Contact Josh and the Dr. Peter Center by email through our designated communicator to determine dates and times for meetings and  volunteering opportunities. Contact farmers market organizers to obtain permission and determine appropriate times and means for interviewing farmers.
  3. Examine the gathered data: Assess data and identify gaps that need to be addressed through subsequent meetings with our community partners.

Final Thoughts

Our group is grateful for this opportunity to work with and learn from such inspirational community organizations, such as Dr. Peter Brown and HIM. We are excited to see how our objectives and strategies develop; creating the survey and analyzing our data will be something new to all of us. We invite readers to continue following our blog as we dive into the primary research of our food waste reduction project.

Works Cited

Bradley, K., & Herrera, H. (2016). Decolonizing food justice: Naming, resisting, and researching colonizing forces in the movement: Decolonizing food justice. Antipode, 48(1), 97-114. doi:10.1111/anti.12165

Mathie, A., & Cunningham, G. (2003). From clients to citizens: Asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development. Development in Practice, 13(5), 474-486. doi:10.1080/0961452032000125857

Sirolli, Ernesto. Ernesto Sirolli: Want To Help Someone? Shut Up And Listen!. 2012. Web. 17 Sept. 2016.

Vogt and Goldman (2016). Raising the Bar. Gimlet Media. [Podcast].