Left to right: Elaine, Eunsoo, Alfred, Elliott, Emerlin, Elise
Hi! We are group “6” from LFS 350, and we have “6 people” in our group! 😀
For our members, we have: Elaine Cheng, Alfred Ke, Elise O’Driscoll, Eunsoo Suh, Emerline Law, and last but not least Elliott To.
Elaine Cheng, who is majoring in Food and Nutritional Sciences and she is interested in skincare and health because, at a molecular level, skin condition can be an indicator of the health. For instance, having acne can give hints that the person is having the difficulty with the digesting system or managing the stress level. She has an interest in how food intake affects a person’s skin, such as dehydration causing flakiness or reactions like hives from reactions to allergens in the food.
Alfred Ke is in Food and Environmental Sciences and is interested in microbiology and food sciences. In the molecular level, he has an interest in the role of microorganisms in food and also learning about the application of microorganisms in food production.
Elise O’Driscoll, who is majoring in Food Sciences. She is interested in cooking, recipe development and nutritional health. She also loves preparing and cooking nutritious foods and to share them with her friends and family. In this way she sees how food can bring people together to connect, which can apply to a broader community.
Eunsoo Suh, who is majoring in Food Nutrition and Health Sciences and she is interested in Functional foods/nutraceuticals and how they exert their beneficial effects in our bodies under absorption at a molecular level. Understanding that obesity has become one of the major health problems worldwide especially in North America, she is interested in studying how different types of functional food products/supplements can serve as potential treatments for obesity and diet management.
Emerlin Law is majoring in Food, Nutrition and Health and is interested in diet development adapted for different body types. She is interested in creating a diet plans adjusted to every individual’s needs to promote the optimal health and prevent
Elliott To is majoring in Food, Nutrition and Health and he is fascinated by the effect of nutrition on cognitive and physiological functioning. This includes studying how food is used as fuel for the body, optimizing macronutrient and micronutrient intake to improve people’s physical capabilities.
Students goals: Finding out that everyone in our group is coming from the similar nutrition-related educational background, we were very excited and were pleased to meet and work together as a team throughout this term. For LFS 350, our aims are first to create a healthy and “sustainable” teamwork environment and ultimately to finish off the term strongly. To make that happen, we all agreed that we will work together to build a trust by respecting one another, having integrity, being honest with any struggles we end up facing and taking responsibility for individual work. Our final goal is from having an effective team-work will positively impact our learning environment more engaging and more interesting to learn the subject. We all have our unique takes on how we engage in school work and problem solve so we hope that our differences will function as an asset when working on group assignments.
Group Interest and the reason for choosing the project: Since all of us in the group are interested in foods and nutrition effects on health in the population, we all agreed that the community kitchen project called “Accessing the availability and use of kitchens for community food programming in Vancouver” was the best option. We felt that this project will allow us to learn about what community food programmings are there and practiced and how those food programs are positively impacting the community members and more specifically on their health.
As we understand that functional community kitchens provide the space where participants to come and cook together, we wanted to learn more about how the community currently uses the kitchens. We also wanted to learn the similarities and differences from between disparate or more comparable neighborhoods and also what benefits and limitations there are for community members to have the kitchens in their neighborhoods.
As a result, our main objective is to study on how community kitchens can be utilized and improved in order to pursue a sustainable food system and contribute to food assets that can serve continuously in the city of Vancouver.
What we wish to gain in LFS 350: We wish to learn more about community kitchens within the LFS 350 course framework, how they work, and the challenges they face. It would be interesting to work with the City of Vancouver Social Policy Department’s Food Strategy Implementation Team to better understand the intricacies involved with local food systems. Furthermore, from experiencing contacting community agency and building connections with. In doing so we wish to gain a scope of understanding about the community kitchens. And more broadly we wish to experience and learn how it is like to be an active citizen within the food system, searching community kitchens and independently contacting the organization/agency making arrangements with them and so on.
For our first impression of process to date, Ernesto Sirolli talked about how his projects in Africa were not successful. What he learned from this is that going into a community with a strict plan and neglecting to ask the local community what they need and why it is needed tends to lead to failure. If people are already doing something in a certain way, there could be significant reasons as to why. By engaging and communicating with the people we’re trying to help we are able to better understand their needs as well as what they have to offer. This follows the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) strategy that we are trying to implement: What do we have to work with, what opportunities can be fulfilled through the utilization kitchens? We don’t want to look for what they are lacking, we are looking to avoid finding the negatives. It is often in people’s nature to go in and attempt to fix what is “broken”. The ABCD approach aims to get more people from the local community to be involved in the improvement and functioning of a community-based project and thus linking people’s opinions and regional knowledge to changes being made. We are hoping to approach this project by identifying existing assets that are ignored or unidentified by community members in community kitchen so we can actually work towards maximizing positive usage of community kitchens by the City of Vancouver.
In this project, our community partner is a social planner of the city of Vancouver, she provided us with details on how we can access community kitchens in the area. In the next few weeks, we plan on visiting community kitchens in Mt. Pleasant and get an insight of kitchen usage and accessibility in the city of Vancouver. We will do a survey for each visited kitchen to collect data for community kitchen usage in the city of Vancouver as well as taking pictures to help make observations, whenever possible and see what community members were omitting capacities in each site. From this analysis, we hope to provide useful comment for our community partner in making decision on city development.