All Good Things Come to an End

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

The assessment of community kitchens in downtown Vancouver was a project where students in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems at the University of British Columbia collaborated with the Food Strategy Implementation (FSI) Team of the City of Vancouver Social Policy Department. This report focuses on kitchens in the Downtown Vancouver area, which is one of six neighborhoods involved in this project.

Community kitchens are publicly available areas where individuals can gather and prepare meals independently or in an organized program. The objective of the project was to collect  baseline data about the availability and use of community kitchens while assessing the condition of the facilities. The data gathered was used to make recommendations to the City of Vancouver to guide future investments and research.

The assessment was administered through site visits to the kitchens with a survey developed by the FSI team. The survey was conducted by interviewing a community contact at the community kitchens, usually someone with an administrative role, in addition to recording observations during the visit. After all kitchen assessments were completed, the team compiled and analyzed the data which gave rise to key findings and recommendations for the City of Vancouver.

The project revealed that, contrary to the literature, many of the community kitchens we visited were not being utilized for communal meal preparation. Most of the kitchens were providing services to help mitigate immediate hunger, filling a crucial role in the lives of many food insecure citizens. Although the kitchens’ equipment was in good condition, we believe there is potential to enhance community programming.

One recommendation that arose from this project is to open the kitchen spaces to more community programming. Another recommendation is to provide more funding to community kitchens  for additional staff members to allow for more programming.

So where does that leave us?

A major moment of significance for the team happened quite late into the project. After reading about asset-based community development (ABCD) so much, we figured we were borderline experts. As we were analyzing our research findings, we really started to see what main role these kitchens played in their communities. Based on our findings, we came to the conclusion that the kitchens were providing soup-kitchen type services to their community. This was quite contrary to the literature we had read and it all seemed very needs-based and not very asset-based. It appeared that these services weren’t very developmental and appeared to be very much a band-aid solution for food security. We believed the kitchens were not executing services based on ABCD since they weren’t building on the assets of the community but rather filling an important need. 

Then it dawned on us like brick through a window: the kitchens were community assets themselves! We had been framing it all wrong. The kitchens had so much going well for them: good management, great facilities, and engaged community members. We came to realize that the kitchens were indeed developing their respective communities by addressing the immediate food insecurity their patrons were facing. They were developing their community by utilizing the assets the community kitchen provided and that by wrongly judging their approach to ABCD, we had failed to properly apply ABCD ourselves. We had to change our thinking from focusing on what the kitchens weren’t doing (activities beyond providing meals to the community) to enhancing what the kitchens were doing and capable of doing better: improving community food security. It changed our way of assessing our findings and recommendations.

Based on the revelations brought about by ABCD, the team came to another round of conclusions. It brought us back to an earlier moment of significance early in the course related to Ernesto Sirolli’s podcast. By really listening, we were able to make recommendations based on what the community kitchen managers really thought their kitchens needed to further succeed. This is significant since it showed, although daunting, ABCD can provide long-term solutions to difficult problems such as food insecurity if applied correctly. It allowed us to extract meaningful recommendations rooted in community desire and these are more impactful since the community is going to interact with the kitchen the most. This significant moment in the project allowed us to develop our application of ABCD by forcing us to challenge ourselves in a real life situation. We believe the tools and thought processes honed during this project can help us as we move on in our lives and careers.

That’s all folks!