“There’s only one thing that all the successful companies in the world have in common, only one: None were started by one person.” – Ernesto Sirolli

About our Community Organization
The City of Vancouver and CityStudio are working together once again in an effort to engage students and young leaders in complex sustainability challenges. The City of Vancouver and CityStudio work with all levels of government, students, residents, businesses, and other organizations to raise awareness of this plan. This includes finding ways to incorporate student passion and ideas in the co-creation of the city. Their goals are to create a strong local economy, vibrant and inclusive neighbourhoods, and to become an internationally recognized city that meets the needs of future generations. Specifically, they hope to reduce solid waste going to the landfill by 50% from 2008 levels. By 2014, they successfully reached a 23% decrease in waste due to their campaign efforts. Initiatives such as banning organic waste in the garbage, creating easy-to-understand recycling and waste stations, and starting green bin programs in various buildings and residences have been implemented over the years to reach their goal. Projects like ours are created to further progress in this goal, discover possible improvements, and raise awareness of waste management.

Our Project Objectives
The objectives of this project are to increase waste diversion rates at Killarney Community Centre. We will initially observe the behaviours of patrons sorting their waste in Killarney Community Centre. Then, we will be able to determine whether adding decals onto the sorting bins will change the sorting behaviour of patrons. We plan to create an effective data collection method that will tell us what we want to know, and allow us to make improvements and conclusions regarding waste management at Killarney. Further suggestions can then be recommended from the research and observations that have been collected.

Why we chose “City of Vancouver – Put Waste in its Place” project?
For our project, we chose the City of Vancouver because we would like to learn more about our cities waste management system and the efforts that are being put towards improving this system. The fact that we all live in Vancouver makes it more convenient to obtain local data that is relevant to our everyday lives. Learning about how our city functions in waste management can also affect our own behaviors, perhaps leading us to teaching our friends, family and the people around us to live more environmentally friendly through waste management. Meanwhile, the project helps us develop many skills, such as communication, research, observation, data collection and innovation; which we can use in all of our future careers. Improving these skills will help us to graduate with confidence going into the workforce. Finally, we choose this project as it is an opportunity to be a part of an initiative that will contribute to a more sustainable environment, both locally and globally. Improvements in waste management and zero waste initiatives have so many more benefits than just the environment. These include but are not limited to; combatting food insecurity, encouraging food conservation, and starting a conversation about sustainable food systems. We are extremely eager and grateful to be part of the Zero Waste movement with the help of City of Vancouver and City Studio.

Our First Impression
We had a very positive impression in our first meeting with our community project leaders, Jeanie Morton, from CityStudio and Paul Gagnon, from City of Vancouver. During the meeting, we learned more about the collaboration between City of Vancouver and CityStudio, and discussed about a very exciting project we will be working on! After the meeting, our team got some time to reflect on the connections between our first impressions, project and this weeks LFS 350 required readings:

(Check out the links below to understand more about our discussion)

In our first meeting, we integrated the main themes of Ernesto Sirolli’s TED Talk (2012) by first listening to the past experiences that CityStudio has had while planning and implementing this project, before imposing ideas and taking any actions. As they have had students undertake similar projects in the past, we made sure to take into account which techniques have been successful and unsuccessful in order to truly have the project move forward from our involvement. Sirolli (2012) also touched on the importance of finding shared goals and mutually working as a community to achieve it, which we also believe will be extremely beneficial to our success in this project. This brought us to take into accounts the varying focuses different stakeholders have. For example, we will be working with two different community partners, who look at the project from two different standpoints. The City of Vancouver is looking at the project through an economic view, while City Studio is looking at the project through an environmental view. That being said, they both have the same goal of creating a strong local economy, vibrant and inclusive neighborhoods, and to become an internationally recognized city that meets the needs of future generations. Other perspectives may also be valuable, such as community members at the Killarney Community Centre, researchers, waste management workers, and even our own views as UBC LFS students. This same idea is represented in the article “Learning to see Food Justice” by Dixon (2014). The article mentions how Tracie McMillian “describes her discoveries as a kind of seeing that is new to her; it is looking through a new lens”.  In this article, McMillian finds a job in three different stages of the food chain to experience new perspectives. This is much like our project, in how we will have a new lens and perspective on the food waste system by being on the side of policy, waste-management, and sustainability. All in all, to strive for a solution to our very complex food system challenges, we must allow ourselves to experience and be open to the all perspectives, as quoted in Dixon’s article final words “learning to act on behalf of food justice requires that we first ‘adjust the lens'”.

We are all eager to begin our involvement in this project, and to hopefully contribute to a greener Vancouver. 

 

References