Weekly objectives and achievements: 

    This week, our first objective is to find 3 community kitchens that are not part of city-facilities and to contact all community kitchens and schedule appointments. Then, we will make a specific timeline for our community kitchen project. The second objective is to complete the online ethics course and send certificates to TA before our first visit. The third objective is to address the proposal report feedback as a group.  

   Now, we already have scheduled visiting time with 4 community kitchens; three of them are on October 21st (next Wednesday) and the other one is on November 4th.  Also, we have met our TA and discussed the objectives and aim of our project.  In addition, some group members have completed the online ethics course.

Reflection:

A moment that our group agreed to be quite significant over the past week was when we received our grade and feedback for our Project Proposal report. It came as a surprise as we had worked hard on it together and improved it with the feedback from the proposal presentation, but our mark was much lower than what we had expected. The main problem was that there were parts of the syllabus that we had misinterpreted and theories that we had not fully comprehended, hence the completed proposal reflected our knowledge gaps. A positive aspect of this, however, was that our group members responded to the problem together and did not blame any one person, and we recognized that it was something the group came up with together, which helped to improve our cohesiveness as a group.

Even though the the proposal report is only worth a small part of the overall grade, it was important that we did well and understood each component of the project clearly as it would serve as the anchor and compass for our entire Community Kitchen project, as well as our major communication tool with our community partner. While we were working on the report, we should have made sure to understand the project outline completely and consulted our professor and TA more regarding the aspects we did not understand. As a group, we now know that we need to understand the concept of “objectives” more clearly and reassess our objectives for the project as it was one of our weaker but most important aspects of our project. Furthermore, we need to go back to the readings on asset-based community development from the first few sessions to refresh and reaffirm our knowledge of how to focus on our participants’ assets, and not their problems. If necessary, we will find more material or talk to our TA to clarify any confusions we have. This will not only improve our knowledge of how to conduct community research projects, but also contribute to effective communication with our community partner and make sure that we are all on the same page.

Common themes of tensions and opportunities in community based project development from the podcasts:

As mentioned in the podcast “The fish bank”, it is very impressive that how they kept the sustainability of fish farming industry in Bali by only utilizing the assets they have. The speaker described a circumstance which is kind of similar to the community kitchens in our project. Although Bali having the most diverse fish biotic environment in the world, it has experienced a dramatic drop in their fish numbers due to overfishing. Hence, the speaker brought up the idea of “fish bank”,which is setting up a non-fishing area, so that small fishes can grow and reproduce in an adequate period of time. Similarly, for some of the community kitchens, although they have relatively complete facilities, those facilities are not being properly used or even been laid aside. This might be one of the challenges we may meet that how to use the community kitchens more properly. However, by conquering such challenge or tension, they can also be good opportunities to achieve expected outcomes. Our community kitchen project need to follow the principle of asset-based community development, which is also using the resources already in the kitchens to achieve better development. Therefore, referring to the positive effects of “fish bank” in Bali, the community kitchen would function more efficiently by adopting such method.

“Grandma Mahembe’s Farm” comes up with an idea that in the modern society, food and nutrition security plays a critical role comparing to in the past time which people usually planted and cooked their own food. Nowadays, some people would choose fast food over health. The fast food has relatively lower price and it’s usually requires less time to prepare. However, this convenience brought a bigger problem that increasing people cannot intake sufficient nutrients from their diets and become obese and sub-healthy. A lot of people begin to have health problems, such as heart diseases and diabetes due to the unhealthy diets. Some modern lifestyles lead to the unawareness of intaking vital nutrition from healthy food. Therefore, in this case community kitchen might play an important role in facilitating community people and participants’ awareness of eating both healthily and nutritionally. Community kitchen can be a place for people to prepare, share, and eat healthy food. By knowing how the community kitchen operates and what kind of people usually or potentially go to this community kitchen, staffs and volunteers can prepare different activities to promote this idea.

“A Pragmatic Idealist” emphasizes that the most efficient way to understand a person or a group of people is listening to their voice. The speaker works in UN and she has dealt with a lot of people who have AIDS or HIV. She doesn’t care about their diseases or sexuality, but only be willing to listen and talking to them. Also, the speaker’s friend, a HIV patient, as a brave and courageous woman against the unfair discrimination of HIV patients and lesbians, still showed up her fragility and fear when her doctor refused to touch her without gloves on. Hence, it appears to be more important to listen to people’s voice and even their behaviours when they are not talking. The people we may meet in the community kitchens are all from different cultures and backgrounds, which might be a challenge for us, since we do not know the stories behind them. Therefore, it will be more important that we listen to their opinions first and understand their stands of points before giving any suggestions and ideas.

Upcoming objectives and strategies: 

For our upcoming objectives, we will visit 2 to 3 community kitchens and complete the survey questions. We will organize and analyze our survey data, and hold group reflections and discussions based on the visits. We hope to gain further thorough understanding of our communities’ background and assets in order to draft more detailed proposal and plans in helping the community kitchens. To achieve the above objectives, we will familiarize ourselves with the survey questions and practice interview procedures before visiting the community kitchens.