“How you climb a mountain is more important than reaching the top.” ― Yvon Chouinard

Weekly Objectives:

Six weeks intr our thirteen-week journey, we have assembled the produce library. As we have reflected on the work we have completed, we have drawn up weekly objectives to prepare us for the weeks ahead.

Week 7

1. Determine the final position for the produce library
2. Help set up for the event, Riley Park Through the Ages
3. Interview members of Riley Park during the event

Week 8

1. Find a contact who can help with the questionnaires

Week 9

1. Set up meeting with our questionnaire contact, Tamara.
2. Analyze the data we have gathered from the survey and interviews two weeks ago
3. Create a design for the produce library that will aim to improve food literacy.

Achievements:

1. Attended the event, Riley Park Through the Ages, and helped set up tents and posters.
2. Dug more holes for the relocation of the produce library.
3. Secured the roof and shelves with screws and bolts.
4. Established a contact for the questionnaires that will target two groups, those at the neighbourhood house who may be experiencing food insecurity and those at the farmer’s market who may consider donating to the produce library.
5. Interviewed and surveyed members at the Riley Park Through the Ages event.
6. Determined location and place for meeting with our questionnaire contact.

Significant changes

Graph 1- Development of Emotions and Knowledge Week 1 to 13.

We tracked our emotions and amount of knowledge we gain over the weeks thus far and projected until the end of the term. The y-axis is represented in magnitude: 10 being excited and 0 being upset or very confused. The x-axis represents time, in weeks, which also is how we tracked our bar-graph of knowledge. From the emotion curves that we have created, it is obvious that each of our group members have different feelings, impressions and perspectives towards the same meeting or workshop.

One common experience with diverse perspectives from our group is the first meeting with Joanne, our community partner. Some of our group members were feeling excited about the upcoming project while others were a little bit overwhelmed with our project’s objectives.

Another common experience is that all our group members got excited when we came up with the idea of providing free seeds in the produce library, as everyone in the neighbourhood will then be able to grow their own food. By creating opportunities for people to grow their own food, we are giving them a degree of food sovereignty.

Some smaller, but still significant moments have occurred as  our group members have gained different types of knowledge and skills while working on our community based project. The experiences of working on the Riley Park project provided our group with a much deeper understanding about the association of food justice, food security and community. We all believed that we have also developed public speaking skills and communication skills since we had been arranging meeting, organizing events and giving out feedback frequently with our community partner and the volunteers from the Riley Park Garden in a professional way.

One of the most unexpected learning experience for all of our group members was assembling the produce library and the manual labour involved. Many group members grew-up in urban settings, where we seldom have chances to physically assemble structures; therefore, it was quite challenging for most of us due to the lack of experience. However, with the help of the volunteers from the Riley Park Garden who have architectural backgrounds and experiences, we successfully and efficiently assembled our produce library.

We believe our produce library will have a small, yet significant impact on the community. It will promote community engagement by encouraging people to come to the garden and interact with one another.  Since this sense, we believe that the produce library will be a tool for asset-based community development, since it provides a sustainable platform for people living in that community to distribute healthy food. With these beliefs, the overall emotional curve and knowledge curve of our group have been increasing for the past couple months.

 

Graceful Dismount

It is important to keep up the momentum of our project as it nears the end stages. First, by continuing the group attributions that have helped us get this far: communication skills. This allows us to work together efficiently and productively.  Since meeting with the Riley Park community leaders and volunteers almost weekly, we have no concerns regarding the communication between our group and the community members. To ensure the successful completion of our project, we will continue communicating as per usual with all members of the project. Secondly, we have been documenting our progress each week with internal anonymous feedback, and discovering areas in which we can improve, whether it be tardiness or just being prepared for the weather.

 Table 1 – Internal Anonymous Feedback: Areas of Strength, Areas Needing Improvement.

Strengths:	Needs Improvement:
Punctuality – keep arriving on time.	Professionalism – be more mindful of how we want to express professionalism and language choice between group members.
Asking questions when uncertain.	Preparedness – come more prepared next week for garden-situated activities (i.e. rain jackets, gardening gloves).
Teamwork – communication and checking in with each other.	Delegation of tasks – share tasks between group members so one does not become exhausted of one task.
Adaptability – tackled multiple tasks as a group simultaneously by quickly defining responsibilities.

This documentation provides us with feedback that we can refer to and it also shows us how close we are to the completion of our community project. We have realized that it is no longer about learning from the completed project, but about learning along the way. As long as we keep up these strategies, we should have no issues ensuring the successful completion of our project. Throughout our climb to the top of the mountain as a group, we have tried to gain and improve our skills as future land and food system graduates partly by listening to each other’s feedback.