As beautifully displayed fresh food and produce vanish from its basket or table and into the hands of families, home cooks or food enthusiasts, the market has to come to a close. Just like the market, our project has reached its final stage. Our findings have been interpreted and presented to our community partner, peers and faculty members. Our work is done because it is now up to those with the fruitful basket of goods to carry on to create a beautiful dish of success.
Moment of Significance in the Course
What?
As a group, we thought to step out of our comfort zone to survey strangers in different locations was challenging. However, when we had to narrow down what we wanted to present on an infographic, we knew we were presented with a greater challenge. Our presentation was in less than 6 days and we needed to put everything together with a professional infographic because it represented our faculty and community partner. Our moment of significance was the teamwork we had to exercise after being recommended to redo our infographic and from our poster presentation. From surveying, we had an abundance of information but choosing what information to present to our community partner in under 3 minutes seemed challenging. We were met with defeat when our initial infographic draft was given lengthy suggestions by our professor and TA. With an already overwhelming amount of pressure and stress to do well and on top of our continuous course load, we needed one another to help fill in the missing information and redesign the infographic. In the beginning, we all thought we had all the information needed to create an infographic and left the appointed designer in the team to create our infographic. After the backfire from our first infographic, it was no longer a one person job but six brains with 12 creative eyes.
When the presentation day arrived, the amount of uncertainty, stress, and confusion from the beginning of the project vanished as we proudly stood before our printed infographic. However, our teamwork caps couldn’t be hung yet, because we had to explain our findings to our peers, professor, TAs and community partner. We appointed designated speakers to verbally dissect the infographic and draw the audience to experience what we have done in the past three months while the rest of the members were contributing in answering questions from the audience.
So what?
We realized that presenting our findings of what we did in the past 3 months was not easy. As mentioned above, it was not a one-person job because as a group, we had to come together to really narrow down and pinpoint what are our significant findings and how to analyze the data and then be able to present it in a clear way to help our community partner. In our first version of the infographic, we thought that just showcasing our statistics from our survey would be adequate, but through the feedback given, we realized that we need to make sense of our data. During this time of stress, we as group used all our strengths and looked to see what was most beneficial to our community partner. Everyone was actively participating and the importance of our teamwork was not lost on us because each member had a vital role in how the infographic would carry out. All the members had to come together and be on the same page. Our thinking was, how can we present this in a way where everyone, including those who never heard of our project, sees our process clearly.
Other knowledge that we could bring in more of was our problem-solving skills and to realize the purpose of the infographic. Our role was to assist our community partner in reaching their goals and for improvement, so we should realize more of our role in the beginning. Previously we thought we could just throw some data on our infographic, say what we did and that was it. But we needed to present it in a coherent way. Having more of this perspective early on would have been beneficial. If we have realized our roles and the main point of the infographic earlier, then perhaps our first version of the infographic would have been better. Instead of just having the data person and graphic designer work on the infographic, in the beginning, we as a group should have collectively come together and discussed the content and how to showcase it. If we had done this, then perhaps the high-stress situation would not have occurred because we had only 2-3 days to fix our infographic. On the other hand, this emergency situation brought our group closer together and was a team building experience.
Furthermore, in our presentation, we realized that we still need the members. Though our infographic was complete, we couldn’t just rely on 2-3 members to do the presenting, all the members had to be there. The ones who were not presenting, were there to encourage curious onlookers to come over and help to answer questions and give the audience their personal insight and takeaway on the project. Therefore, in every part of our project, we realized that we aren’t just a group of people, but a true team and that we need to rely on each other to effectively carry out our goals.
Figure 1: Group #23’s final infographic on the Artisan Farmers’ Market
Now what?
Now that we have completed the objectives of our CBEL project with the Artisan Farmers’ Market, and produced an infographic presenting our findings, we are looking to see how our work will serve our community partner, Tara. In producing the formal final community project report we hope to provide a comprehensive review of our project that will be of further use to the goal of the assignment. We hope that our findings will lead to the creation of a customer loyalty program and that our customer profile created through surveying helps Tara further understand the consumers that visit the market, and why others may not. With the use of our findings, we would like to see the development of improved marketing techniques that will contribute to the more efficient use of funding and more community members attending the Market.
As a group, we have gained knowledge and skills in teamwork and communication through this project and we hope to take the positive experience to tackle similar projects of this magnitude in the future. We were satisfied with the hands-on experience of surveying and communicating with our community partner as well as learning about the importance of community food security and community-based experiential learning. We hope to employ these experiences in our professional careers and personal lives. Lastly, we look forward to seeing how the Artisan Farmers’ Market will advance in the future, through our teamwork and collaboration with Tara.
Conclusion
We thank Tara, the General Manager of Artisan Farmers’ Market, the Artisan Farmers’ Market Organization and LFS 350 for the opportunity to be apart of this journey to help the Market achieve its goal. We wish the Artisan Farmers’ Market great success in using our data and findings to reach its full potential in the many years to come.
Sincerely,
Jacky, Pilar, Brenda, Nikki, Mahbanou and Phoebe