THE TEAM:
Greetings! Before we dive into talking about the project we are involved in and our experiences along the way, we would like to introduce ourselves. We are all LFS 350 students in our third year in the faculty of Land and Food Systems but we come from different programs. Louie, Lillian, and Mariana are in the Nutritional Sciences major. Levina is in Food, Nutrition, and Health major and finally Yidong is in the Applied Biology major. Although we all come from different backgrounds and have different knowledge we all enjoy not only eating delicious food but also learning about the entire food system! We are all excited and ready to take part in this project and we will keep everyone informed on our progress and experiences along the way.
WHO?
The Pacific Community Resources Society (PCRS) is a community which provides hundreds of meals throughout the week at their Broadway Youth Resource Centre (BYRC). Our primary goal for this project is to help analyze their spending trends and provide insight on the type of food most proceeds are spent towards. This would be a great opportunity to suggest local markets which sell healthy produce and give a variety of options for the PCRS to choose where they wish to purchase their food.
WHY?
As a group, we chose this project with hopes of discovering different aspects within the food industry. We hope that through this project, we will further our understand of how to analyze and create reports based on large amounts of financial information along with creating reports on food trends. Though this may not be our strong point, we hope that this project will enhance our understanding of food marketing and business.
FIRST IMPRESSIONS
“Spending Trends at Pacific Community Resources Society” is an interesting project for us because it is different from the other projects. While most are working on projects focused on the impact of food and nutrition, our project delves deeper into food market analyses. As mentioned above, our goals for this project are to determine current food purchasing trends within the PCRS, as well as giving suggestions as to where they may purchase healthy and local food within their budget, and hopefully the source of this food shares the same views with PCRS (such as companies who provide a living wage).
Unfortunately, none of us are majoring in food market analysis and experienced with finance and marketing, so this is a hurdle we, as a group, must overcome. However, based on the principle of Assets Based Community Development (ABCD), it is more important to appreciate and focus on what assets we have, rather than worrying about what we lack. We may not have much experience with compiling financial data, but we understand the ultimate goal of PCRS is to find out where they are currently spending on food, plus we also have knowledge on the components of healthy and sustainable food.
Another asset for our project is the fact that we have a great community partner representative, Andrea Mears, who we met the past Wednesday. Based off of our meeting, it is evident that Andrea is as excited as we are to work on this project and she has a passion to make a change in the community through her work with PCRS and through food. We believe that such assets can guide us to achieve our goals.
Looking back at Sirolli’s TED Talk, he teaches us that we never succeed on our own. In other words, we always need help from others. In context of our project, the communication between team members and also with our community partner is mandatory. Tying all this up, we believe this project will allow us to gain positive experience through working with PCRS, more specifically BYRC, and gaining new skills.
Next up, we will be getting a tour of BYRC and be able to talk to those in charge of food preparation and purchasing!