The Times They Are A Changin’

Progress:

It’s been two weeks since our last update and we’ve been able to accomplish a lot! Last Friday, we each completed individual academic review papers for LFS 350. We had the opportunity to explore an issue that we are fascinated by and is relevant to our community project. During our group meeting today, we discussed the findings of our literature review and how the concepts we investigated are linked to our community project. This discussion allowed us to explore the purpose of community kitchens from different angles, and made us think about how they target and benefit specific populations. We also discussed the differences between community kitchens in North America and other parts of the world, such as Peru. We noticed that culture can influence the objectives of community kitchens and how communities use their facilities. Our continuous reflections have allowed us to gain a better understanding of how community kitchens can serve individuals beyond the traditional objectives of improving food literacy, but also by helping people develop useful skills that can be applied outside of the kitchen, such as in management and entrepreneurship.

Patrick C. and Nimmie also visited another community kitchen today and met an amazing kitchen director, Michael, who is a professional chef. Passion emanated from him as he spoke about the kitchen and he emphasized how he really enjoyed making a positive difference in his community.  Since starting his position as the cook of the kitchen, he has been able to increase the number of people that regularly visit the kitchen from around 40 to well over 100 people. He attributed his success to his ever-changing multicultural menu that, from the Instagram pictures he showed us, looked absolutely delicious!  He uses his creativity effectively and makes a huge impact within the community; we felt lucky to have been able to speak to him and get an insight on his experiences with community kitchens.

Objectives:

Realizing that we are now in the last month of this semester, we are working out the last steps for wrapping up the project. One of ur immediate goals is to finish collecting the last of our data by next Wednesday. To meet this objective we have contacted a few more kitchens and scheduled interviews for early next week. Meanwhile, we hope to begin brainstorming our methods for data analysis, which will allow us to interpret the final results. We will be meeting next Friday to discuss how we will organize the results of the survey and start our final report/presentation. We hope to meet the deadlines that we’ve set for ourselves in order to stay organized and have enough time to complete our report so that we can be very thorough with our report.

Moment of Significant Change Workshop

Following two weeks of data gathering, we were back in the lecture hall and tutorial rooms last week. The theme of this week was challenges, and managing changes in our project.  In our lecture a panel of our T.A’s shared their inspiring stories of change and  overcoming challenges. Afterwards we met with our groups in our tutorial room and participated in a Moments of Significant Change Workshop lead by our T.A. Adrienne. The goal of the tutorial was to address the challenges that we are facing by reflecting on our project to date. After a quick breathing exercise to set the mood, we started by individually filling in a worksheet to identify and describe the moments of significant change in our project. These moments of change were times in the project where we encountered difficulty and had to change either our actions, perspectives, or both. Afterwards, we made a timeline that reflected our level of motivation during the project, incorporating these moments of significant change. Our group then came together ad had a chance to share our moments of significant change with one another. We finished by mapping out all of our timelines on a sheet to compare and contrast our feelings thoughout the project.

Overall, the activity was really meaningful and allowed for great individual and group reflection on the project. Individually, we had the chance to internalize the project and reflect upon our motivations and challenges. The individual reflection pushed us to critically analyze our experience so far, allowing us to determine learning oments and to identify and recognize changes in our attitudes and beliefs throughout the project. For example, Naomi recalled the moment which caused her to redefine her definition of a community kitchen.

During the group reflection period of the workshop, our group considered  the significance of the project; for the first time we discussed our feelings toward the project. It was a really great way to facilitate important conversations within an understanding atmosphere . We found that many of us had experienced comparable moments of change and shared similar feelings on the project as a whole. For example, we all felt a bit skeptical when we first received our project, but since then, with the exception of a few bumps in the road, our feelings and motivation for the project have been on an upwards trajecory. We also discussed the moment when we changed our development lens from one that was deficit based to an asset based approach. Sharing our experiences not only validated our feelings toward the project, but also allowed for group bonding. This workshop initiated reflection and critical analysis of the project, which will be very important for compiling our final report.

Towards the Finish Line

With only four weeks left of classes, and almost a month until our final report is due, it’s time for us to begin the last assignment. We’ve established that we expect to finish our report early in order to leave time for a thorough edit, and we are also keeping a close eye on planning our time well so that we are able to do a comprehensive analysis of our data. In order to do this, we will come up with a timeline . The timeline we have constructed for the next month is essential to ensure that we stay on track and  our final report includes all the required components. Because our group membershave busy lives, we’ve recognized that our schedule will have to be flexible and considerate of any time conflicts that may arise. By Remembrance Day, November 11th, we should have finished collecting our data from kitchen visits and be ready to move on to data analysis and writing our report! We’ve set ourselves an early deadline for our first rough draft, November 27th, to ensure that we have time to create a presentation based on our report. Once we’ve presented on December 2nd, we will have left ourselves enough time to do a final edit and respond to feedback from our presentation before the final project report is due on December 7th.

Timeline

• Nov. 11 (Wednesday) – collected all data

  

• Nov. 13 (Friday) – ideas to analyze data, ask any questions about the report
• complete report first, create presentation, edit report based on feedback
• Nov. 27 – rough draft report
  
• Nov. 30, Dec. 1,2 prepare for presentation
• Dec. 3,4 update report, finalize and hand in
• Dec 4- final blog

We also continue to engage in group discussions about the project in order to encourage continuous reflection on our project and the related themes. Our discussions and personal reflections will help us establish what types of methods we want to use to analyze our data, the type of diagrams and graphs are we going to use to represent our data, and how can we organize our data into tables to help our analysis. These discussions will help us in our first steps of data analysis and will aid us in developing a discussion around our findings.