Project Description
As students within the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, many of our personal values aligned with the five core themes published in the Vancouver Food Strategy.
- Support food-friendly neighbourhoods
- Empower residents to take action
- Improve access to healthy, affordable, culturally diverse food for all residents
- Make food a centrepiece of a green economy
- Advocate for a just and sustainable food system
To support these initiatives, we proposed the idea of creating an online database that would record all locally owned fresh produce markets. The database would then be indexed by neighbourhood. This database would provide local residents with a resource that would inform them of a greater variety of options within their own neighbourhoods to select from when purchasing fresh produce. The reasoning behind our idea is that residents new to neighbourhoods may have limited knowledge of their surrounding areas. When shopping for groceries, many people search online for the nearest store that fit their needs and may not consider local produce markets who don’t possess the time or resources to establish an online presence.
We believe a resource of this manner will help promote and increase both visibility and access of locally owned produce markets. We hope to encourage increased community connection and partnership between local residents, business owners and farmers.
The neighbourhoods we have selected to create databases for include: Marpole, Sunset, Riley Park, and Mount. These neighbourhoods were chosen based off of 2005 Vancouver Census data with respect to lower median household income.
View census data here: http://http://globalnews.ca/news/370804/income-by-postal-code/
Project Objectives
- Contributing to more safe and secure access to food, especially low-income individuals and families. We realize that we are very fortunate attending the University of British Columbia, and with that, we realize many people do not have access to basic necessities, let alone education. By having a localized platform of nearby locations, this will serve as a secure and dependable opportunity to access food.
- Connect community stakeholders. Connecting local farms, community stakeholders (grocery stores, farmers markets, and restaurants) with one another and providing additional and current information regarding their accessibility
- Help recognize smaller, local businesses. Small stores may be present, but not well known within the local community. By having all the small businesses indexed, this will bring forth their existence and relevance within the community.