This project has had a slow beginning so far, but we are slowly feeling how it is picking up. We are excited to get responses from the emails we send and phone calls we make and start getting all our information together to really identify the problems faced by the non-English speaking communities of Vancouver.
- Our objectives and achievements:
Over these past few days, each team member finished the online tutorial and got the CORE certificate. We also completed the necessary consent form to be able to engage with the community. We received positive feedback on our presentation and blog post, and our team morale was boosted. To move forward with our project research we found coordinator’s contact information on the Vancouver Community Garden website, and each of us were assigned 10 coordinators to contact via email. An email template is presented at the end of this blog.
In the upcoming days, Victoria will contact those coordinators who have phone numbers instead of email addresses. However, some community gardens do not show any contact information online. We will first attempt to find contact information from their websites, but if this is unsuccessful we will plan to go to visit those gardens and ask them prepared questions. Hopefully, we will get prompt responses from as many coordinators as possible, then in future weeks we will work on analyzing the data.
- Connecting our project to the podcasts:
In the podcast “Poultry Slam: Act Three: Latin Liver” by This American Life, a New York Chef by the name of Dan Barber discovered a way to ethically feed geese and create a unique and coveted taste in foie gras from a Spaniard, Eduardo Sousa. As Dan mentioned in the podcast, ”every chef loves foie gras,” so he decided to try to raise geese the same way Eduardo Sousa does in Spain. Dan’s story of geese husbandry is fraught with failures over the course of three years. Like Dan, our group met our first setback during the past week when we received a poor mark on our group proposal report. We were disappointed with the feedback since we thought we had done an excellent job of the report when we handed it in. We learned that we had failed to be specific in our methodology and plans for our project. Our proposal needed to explicitly outline how we would measure success, and address the limitations of scope our project may face.
Although we failed to adequately articulate a few aspects of our project in our proposal, from this feedback we will be able to ensure our future work is more specific. The feedback from our proposal will be one of many missteps or failures that our group will encounter during this project. From listening to Dan’s story about goose farming, we know that it is important to expect these failures. For example Dan brought Eduardo to the states to better develop his goose farm, but by the end of the podcast Dan still expressed frustration with the difficulties of raising geese humanely. Although Dan acknowledged the issues at his farm, and implemented plans to fix them, it is still doubtful if his issue were ‘resolved’. In the same way, although we did poorly on the proposal and will work in the future to do better, there may not be clear ‘success’ at the end of our project. We also acknowledge that a grade on a report is only one way to assess our project, and that shouldn’t be our only marker of success.
To move forward with our project we will ensure that future assignments will closely follow the rubric and that any project plans are measurable. By following the guideline of the rubrics, we will be able to achieve the target and criteria for success. We hope that by creating measureable concrete plans we will be more successful at assessing the accessibility of community gardens in Vancouver. When trying to contact community coordinators we have already experienced how diverse each garden and program is, therefore it is difficult to compare them. By ensuring that we have clearly identified what we consider a garden and an application, then creating spaces for subjects that don’t fall into our definitions, we can ensure that we create and assess a holistic picture of Vancouver’s community gardens.
- Our future goals and steps for achieving them:
As we already created a draft if the e-mail to be sent to community garden contacts, our goals for this week are to divide up the e-mail list of all the contacts. The 7 of us are in charge of sending emails to 10 people on the list. As for the contacts that have phone numbers, Victoria will call them and gather their information; for this purpose, she will use the email draft as a script.
Once we have sent out the emails, the next steps are to wait for responses in order to start gathering data in a coherent manner and then start analyzing it. We will create an Excel document for this purposes, with various categories of responses; after a certain time, we will analyze all of them together.
As for the gardens that have neither emails nor phones, our goal for this week is to look for information on their webpage and try to find a way of contacting them. By our next meeting, we will compile this information and distribute those contacts between our group members. For the gardens that have no way of contacting them, we will divide them based on location (or language spoken in the case of “La Cosecha”) and aim to visit them within the week. After this whole process, we will be able to compile our relevant information and start analyzing the data.