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.

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.

Hi everyone! We are well into the second week of October, marking our 6 weeks together as a project group. Most of those days were spent getting to know each other and brainstorming ideas for our project. Now that we have a project skeleton, it’s time to reflect on some of our achievements so far, and some upcoming goals and objectives!

Last week we worked effectively in co-writing a project proposal report then presented this group proposal to our TA Josh and fellow students. The teaching staff and our tutorial group gave us feedback and suggestions about the project. With their input, we adjusted and completed the project plan and made a clear schedule for the next few weeks of goals and deadlines.

This week, we plan to finish the following tasks: by Thursday, Oct 15th, each member needs to complete the CORE tutorial and emails the certificate to our TA Josh. By the next day, Oct 16th, the consent form will be filled out. We will determine a list of community garden coordinators to contact and divide tasks between group members by Saturday, Oct 17th.

It wasn’t always smooth sailing though…we definitely hit a couple bumps on the road to formulating a project plan. Beginning the term as a newly formed group, we found out very quickly that we all shared an interest in urban farming, nutrition, and empowering at-risk children and family in developing a healthy relationship with their food. Like one of the Vancouver’s Food Strategies, we wanted to develop a project that would ‘improve access to healthy, affordable, and culturally diverse foods for all residents’. However, there were many different and conflicting ideas on what our project was going to entail, as well as an extensive list of goals. Enthusiastic about developing a grand project that was able to empower residents, our group initially aimed to create an after school gardening program, writing a gardening manual and even a cook book!

Our ambitious plan was not practical. In order to make our project achievable, we narrowed down our ideas, and brought our focus onto one specific issue related to the accessibility of community gardens. After much brainstorming, we came to a consensus on developing a project that would improve the accessibility of community gardens to non-English speakers in the city, especially new immigrants. Since most of our group members are immigrants who learned English as a second language upon moving to Vancouver, we found this project very fitting, as we could relate to the challenges of not having access to multilingual resources. Just like Sisonke Msimang (2014), we could empathize with the new immigrants and non-English speakers of the city.

In order to collect a complete set of data and to obtain accurate information for our research, it will be crucial for us to aim in contacting one hundred percent of the community garden coordinators. We must ensure each community garden application and resource are thoroughly surveyed, in order to carry out the essential steps needed to improve the accessibility of community gardens for everyone.

There are upsides and downsides of the action we took to counterpart the difficulties we faced. For one, we will be able to finish the designed project on time by not doing complicated tasks, while focusing on getting a more accurate and reliable result from the data collected. However, it is possible that we cannot pay attention to other difficulties that non-native speakers have in their garden application process, such as cultural or other ethical differences.

Looking forward…

Our next objective is to complete formulating set of questions to ask community garden coordinators and to make a general outline of formal emails, which will be sent out to the coordinators by Tuesday, Oct 20. To achieve this, we will first brainstorm together as a group and then come up with some questions regarding the accessibility of community gardens for local residents. Specifically, we will bring up questions with respect to language barriers and its impact on community garden participation. We will ask the coordinators about the general demographic information of their communities. We will also inquire about the availability of multilingual applications. If their application forms are available only in English, we will assess how difficult it is to comprehend the application for new immigrants who barely speak English in their day-to-day life. After completing the questions, we will identify the community garden coordinators and find out their contact information online. Our last step is to contact them via email. We aim to contact as many community garden coordinators as possible because we cannot guarantee a 100% reply from all of them; besides, the more data we collect, the more reliable and accurate our result will be.

Our second upcoming objective is to actually start contacting community garden coordinators, gathering data and making appointments; we hope to eventually be able to visit some of these gardens in order to gain more data. Our strategy for that is to divide the community gardens by region and assign a region per team member, thus spreading out the work and assuring each community garden has a contact within our group. This will happen on October 21st. We will then put the feedbacks from the coordinators together, and pick out the community gardens that respond most positively to arrange consent for making visits. Then we will write out questions to ask when we make the site visits, interview people present at the gardens, and analyse our data based on our findings.

For the community gardens that we did not visit, we will simply use the information gathered from the original survey.