Our Vision
Freshen up your home recipes with local herbs at your nearest herb box today!
Herbs are known not only for their use in cooking but also for therapeutic properties, making them very suitable for remedies, teas, and meals. By providing access to free herbs, we hope that it will give community members a greater variety of natural foods in their diet.
Gordon Neighbourhood House (GNH) is an organization that manages various community services aimed to enhance and facilitate the West End community development. The services which GNH provides are tailored to meet the needs of local individuals and adapt to the dynamics of the constantly changing community. Currently, GNH is collaborating with different partners on over 20 different community programs varying from workshops which involve family activities to community lunches.
As part of their Urban farming initiatives, GNH has 10 herb gardens scattered in various part of the West End area. These gardens provide fresh and accessible produce that is harvested for the GNH lunch program and its other initiatives, but also available to anyone in the community who needs it.
Although the herb gardens are great resources for the community to utilize, not many individuals locally are aware of their existence and purpose. In order to raise the community’s awareness of the herb gardens and fully utilize them, the Herb Garden Program Enhancement was created. Through this program, our group will study how the community interacts with the garden and later use the findings to develop a new approach to hopefully encourage and better facilitate engagement between the two.
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Goals and Objectives
Our goals for this community project is to increase the public’s awareness on what herb boxes are and how they are a part of their neighbourhood. Our objective is to educate the community through visual cues on how to properly trim and care for the herbs.
There are currently 10 herb boxes placed around the GNH neighbourhood for the community to use freely and respectfully. Engagement with these boxes have been relatively low and have been vandalized in the past. During the course of this project, we hope to impact the GNH community by showing them the types of resources that are offered to them. Also, we aim to show the community how nutrition can be easily accessed and encourage them to potentially start their own gardens.
One of our possible approaches is to decorate the current plain wooden boxes with paintings or murals. Paintings could raise people’s awareness on the existence of the herb boxes. The paintings can also help engage and educate the younger ages on natural herbs and their nutrition. We also plan on having simple step-pictures showcasing how to properly trim and harvest the given plants in their respective boxes. These pictures are in hopes of encouraging those who do not know much about herb gardening to participate in this community event and spread the knowledge with their peers.
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First Impressions
After our first meeting with Joey, the farmer of Gordon Neighbourhood House, our team has acknowledged both the benefits and issues associating with the herb boxes. Since our main goal of this program is to raise the public’s awareness on the herb boxes, our team has come up with numerous ideas for the project as previously mentioned. At the same time, we still have to tackle the struggles that GNH has with the herb boxes, such as vandalism and theft. There are simply too many ideas we would like to implement to improve the herb boxes but unfortunately, time does not allow it. In addition to project design, we found that it is difficult for us to all meet at a designated time due to everyone’s different schedules. However, after our visit to GNH, we are all very excited about the project and to see what kind of changes we can make to the community.
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From Textbooks to Herb Boxes
Our first visit to Gordon Neighbourhood House started with our community partner, Joey, introducing GNH’s food philosophy. She mentioned how everyone is able to bring something to the table and how we all can learn from one another. She also mentioned how every neighbourhood house is different and that each of them reflects their surrounding communities. This introduction given by Joey really echoes with Ernesto Sirolli’s TED talk “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!”. The TED talk mentions how outside members of a community need to first learn from the people within the community, before implementing ideas or changes. This was an important subject in Sirolli’s presentation as he mentioned how people tend to forget to listen before taking action. We took this information and decided to reach out to local volunteers in order to have an inside opinion before taking our next steps. GNH also reminded us about learning the principles of Asset Based Community Development when they mentioned: “everyone has something to bring to the table, we all can learn from each other”.
As we listen and discuss with the community members, we hope to assist GNH in providing food that is healthy, affordable and dignified in a place where everyone can feel safe and respected.
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References
Dixon, B. A. (2014). Learning to see food justice. Agriculture and Human Values, 31(2), 175–184. Retrieved through the UBC Library Website.
Bang, D. M., Carol D., & Lee, M. (2014). Point of View Affects How Science Is Done. Scientific American. Retrieved from http://www.scientificamerican.com/article/point-of-view-affects-how-science-is-done/
Sirolli, E. (2012). Want to help someone? Shut up and listen. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=chXsLtHqfdM