Greetings from Group 17! We have just passed one of the important stops in our journey of assessing comunity kitchens, which is completing the proposal. The next step is to contact with community kitchens and do surveys about the condition. Are you ready for more new information about kitchens in Killarney? Don’t forget to follow us on our blog!
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Week 1 (Jan 4-8) |
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Week 2 (Jan 11-15) |
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Week 3 (Jan 18-22) |
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Week 4 (Jan 25-29) |
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Week 5 (Feb 1-5) |
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Week 6 (Feb 8-12) |
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Assessment of Killarney Neighbourhood Community Kitchens Proposal:
Moment of Significance:
After completing our proposal, the next step was approaching community partners. The ideal outcome for this step was to collect data. In approaching this next step, we came across some obstacles. The most significant being a difficulty in locating community kitchens in the neighbourhood of our interest. Our initial thought was to search for kitchen organizers on Google and Yellow Pages. Unfortunately, we found that the majority of community kitchens in Killarney are organized by The City of Vancouver. In an attempt not only rely on the internet, we called some churches in Killarney to inquire whether or not they knew of any private kitchens. We were unsuccesful in gaining information from them. We also emailed some partners to introduce our project, and to invite them to participate. Thankfully, one of the partners who we contacted did reply. Unfortunately, she does not have a kitchen, but she did share some contacts of hers in the hope that they may have kitchens. The next steps will include getting in touch with other community partners, hopefully using our new contacts as well as visiting the neighbourhood. We had similar research experiences as this project, which was studying local food systems of different schools in East Vancouver. Vancouver School Board was the partner of Think & Eat Green @ School program. Benefiting from the partnership, we were assigned to a school to study. So it was easy to contact with schools and assess the condition of school food systems. What we learnt from the problems of approaching kitchens was not to rely on the partnership but try to access kitchens in different ways, for example, going to the community in person.
Upcoming Objectives:
The upcoming objectives for our group are to find community kitchens located in the Killarney area and begin to introduce them to the project for participation. The first strategy is to connect with the Vancouver Food Bank Society as a main source for community kitchen networks. They hold workshops for leadership of community kitchens so they may be able to connect us with members in attendence from the Killarney Area. If there is no connections we can make that way, the next strategy will be to contact the churches, YMCA, and community buildings to see if any spaces are rented out during the week from their facilities for community kitchens. If there are still no responses we will have to regroup and decide the next course of action. If we are successful then we will make meeting times with each canditate and conduct the survey. Once surveys are finished, the next objective is to summarize the data and start analysis.