Blog post 3

Objectives and achievements of this week:

The objectives of this week are to continue searching and contacting community kitchens,  complete reflection questions for the two community kitchens we have interviewed, send follow up/thank you emails to the two community kitchens we visited to keep in touch and organize the collected data into electronic document as well as the online survey.

Currently, we completed two community kitchen visits, which are Cedar Cottage Neighbourhood House and Grandview Calvalry Baptist Church. All members in our group finished the TCPS2 online tutorial and got prepared for the community kitchen interviews. Also, we had successful communication with Sarah regarding survey feedback and gained knowledge on the backgrounds, cultures and methods of operation of the kitchens. Overall, we gained more confidence on being an observer and interviewer during the community kitchen visits.

Significant Moments

Although we had planned out our meetings with our community partners very well, when we sent them confirmation emails, people started cancelling and changing times very last minute, as it was the week of and even the day before we were about to visit. Because of those changes, we had to reschedule everything the day before we were going to visit. It wasn’t really anyone’s fault, but it was quite hectic and frustrating when we kept having to change things.

Due to the sudden last minute changes, there was a lot of confusion within our group as to who was visiting where at what time, and it caused confusion and the need to reschedule for the other community kitchens as well. Because we had one kitchen cancel on us, we lost a valuable kitchen to assess and will now have to contact more kitchens for our project. However, this experience has taught us that not everything will go according to plan, and we must always be ready for changes that may be made.

To make up for the loss, we will now have to contact more kitchens. However, we also received many other contacts for potential community partners from the kitchens we interviewed today. This has taught us that although there are setbacks from one aspect, we can also gain things from a different aspect. It is unfortunate that we lost a contact so we cannot learn about their kitchen, but we have already received a wide variety of answers and will be sure to receive more from our future kitchens. In the future, we can also make sure we send out confirmation emails earlier so that there is more time for people to make their respective changes, and for us to make sure everything is in order for our visit.

 

Integrate with Podcast:

As mentioned in the Podcast “Poutry Slam 2011”, Dan Barber at New York State, tried to replicate Eduardo’s geese feeding experiment which was held in Spain; however, he encountered many problems during the process. The weather in New York State is colder than in Spain, so the vegetation used by Eduardo cannot grow causing the geese to starve. Barber imitated Eduardo and avoided using fences to allow the geese to have “wild” life; however, the predator problem results in huge sacrifice of the geese lives. We can see that simple copying and pasting will not work for different circumstances under different conditions. The specific factors for each case need to be considered before directly adapting any methods from other successful cases. Similarly, in our project, different community kitchens have different assets. We cannot implement the same strategy on all community kitchens assessments. They may have different backgrounds and functions like New York and Spain are suitable for planting different varieties of vegetables for geese feeding. After the two visits we had this week, we found that although these two kitchens are in the same area, they do  have very different assets, such as size, management, time shift. We cannot generalize and treat every kitchen by using the same adaption or analysis method. It is a good practice to customize the methods of the assessments for different community kitchens.

Moreover, Dan Barber came up with a new solution of using incubation rooms, but it was not appropriate since it opposes to the idea of raising the geese in the “wild” way and further creates more problems. The mother geese lost their instinct to lay and hatch the egg. This reflects that we cannot simply make assumptions for the kitchen assessment. In the beginning, it might be helpful to make some hypotheses to plan the processes, but any decisions need to be made based on the substantial facts we observed or recorded, not assumptions. For example, we assess the community kitchens by visiting, interviewing, and discussion instead of doing research online. During all these processes, we can start to get an idea that how to evaluate the assets in each community kitchen. All the assumptions would only be our preparation in the research stage. Furthermore, this project is a very useful opportunity for us to learn from different people and learning is long-term process, which is always involving in continuous failings and improvements. To achieve successful learning, we need to be adaptable, flexible and open-minded. We can learn from past successful cases, but not simply imitate the way they have done. The point is we can gain the skills by learning and more importantly by applying what we learned to the real-life cases.

Upcoming objectives and strategies:

For the upcoming objectives, we will find two more community kitchens based on our research and try to make appointments with the community staffs. Also, we will do research on the backgrounds of two upcoming community kitchens, which are both scheduled on Nov.4th. In term of the experience of first two community kitchens visits, we would build up strategies for addressing the unexpected changes or issues may happen during the process of data collection from different community kitchens. For the convenience of data analysis later, we would also need to organize the data collected and think of the appropriate methods of data analysis. In addition, we will continue to practise our communication and interview skills, and reflect the process or problems happened within group.

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