This week, our first objective is to visit three scheduled kitchens and roughly organize as well as discuss the information we collected after visits in our weekly meeting. The second objective is to confirm two more kitchen visiting appointments, which will happen in the following week. Additionally, we will input all the information we collected so far into the online survey website and discuss about the possible methods for organizing and analyzing the data.

For the achievements, we made revisions of the aim and objectives of our proposal report and send it to TA for confirmation to get a more clear idea of the purpose of the entire project. As the same for last week, we visited three kitchens, which are City Reach Care Society (Broadway Church), Reach Community Health Center and Helping Spirit lodge Society respectively. After visits, our group also spent time on reflecting on each interview to find what are the common points and differences between these four kitchens including two from each of our assigned areas. Furthermore, we made contact with the other two community kitchens that have not confirmed on visiting yet. From the tutorial last week, we also got feedback on the project progress so far from our TA and instructor.  

The Moment of Significant Change workshop was very insightful in helping our group identify our significant moments both personally and as a group. It helped us reflect on our own attitudes and behaviors towards one another, and really helped us to bond together as a group as we shared our stories to one another. We reflected on our first impressions, our attitude towards the project, and how they changed as the project developed. For the most part, our group agreed on starting off neutral, and our motivation slowly deteriorating after receiving an initially poor mark on our proposal. However, as we started contacting kitchens and interviewing them, we all became more motivated and interested. We also got to know each other better and learned more about our strengths and weaknesses, and became better able to utilize everyone’s assets, allowing us to work together better when completing our assignments. As of today, we are all currently feeling very motivated and we hope to maintain that level of excitement throughout the rest of our project and finish off strong.

The ability to understand the aim and objectives of the project and always think of the aim through the entire project is critical for successful project completion. Furthermore, as the project progresses, communications within our group and with community kitchens become very important. Good communication within our group helps us know everyone’s strength and weakness, which makes the project management more efficient. Efficient communications with the staffs of the community kitchens make the visiting and interviews go through more smoothly. Also, it is very necessary to keep in touch with the community kitchens, which may help us  collect additional information later on and get back to them if there are any updates for our project. During the process of the project, our ability to make adjustment to any changes is an another important factor. Sometimes the community kitchen staffs cancelled the appointment before the last minutes, then we need to re-arrange for the visit or look for other community kitchens. During the project, we gained the experience of how to deal with these kind of changes and this is also very important to finish up the project, because the analysis and conclusion parts may have more unexpected results. After collecting data from all six community kitchens, using  proper analyzing methods would lead to the successful project completion as well, which can give us more clear pictures of what the community kitchens currently have and how they are doing, and to further connect to the food strategy of the city. Throughout the project, reflection of each visit and every component of the project is also an important aspect. Each of the group members would always reflect on what we have learned and how we can improve in the future.