Our project is starting to roll and it is slowly
becoming a bigger roller coaster
ride than we initially thought!  We are still very excited
to see our end goal and
have prepared a proposal to guide
us along the way, available here.

Weekly Objectives

Week of January 16^th-January 27^th

• Brainstorm questions and research more about the Breakfast Club of Canada (BCC) to prepare for our first meeting with Robin on January 23^rd
• Questions discussed included:
  • How do schools become part of the BCC?
  • How is funding distributed for BCC schools?
  • What are the expectations and desired outcomes of this project?
  • What are the guidelines for finding farmers in B.C. to contact?  What criteria must they meet?  Any specific product or quantity?
  • What information do we need to gather from each farmer?
  • What should our final product look like?
• Complete the first blog post introducing our expectations and group members for January 27^th

Achievements
Completing the first blog assignment allowed us to further understand our project with The Breakfast Club of Canada (BCC) and establish our group’s goals, as well as learn more about each group members backgrounds and interests. We felt that our first meeting with Robin was successful as we left the meeting feeling more prepared and certain of what was expected of us!

Week of January 30^th-February 17^th

• Assign different regions of B.C. to each group member to research and locate farmers near BCC schools
• Learn the appropriate dialog to farmers through a cold call  
• Create a spreadsheet that organizes the farmers into different regions within B.C. and sent to Robin by February 17th
• Think of any questions that still need clarifications from Robin for our second meeting on February 3rd

Achievements

Unfortunately for us, Mother Nature had some plans of her own on Friday, February 3rd with the weather.  We all woke up to heavy snow, which made the commute to Robin’s office much longer than we had anticipated. Despite the lateness, we able to arrived safely. During this meeting, Robin went over the protocols with regards to calling the farmers.. He showed us a test call to a random farmer from the Farmers’ Directory.  Before our meeting, we were apprehensive about cold calling farmers. But after Robin’s successful demonstration, we were put at ease.

After the meeting, we decided to divide the work up,  researching and finding farmers to add to our GoogleDoc directory by Friday, February 17th and to send the list to Robin for suggestions.  Using the map provided to us by Robin, which indicated the location of all the schools supported by the Breakfast Club of Canada in B.C., we grouped the school clusters and found farms nearby.  We completed this task successfully (found a total of 123 farms) and sent it over to him by the deadline.  It was a bit difficult to categorize the farms and decide on what were breakfast appropriate foods.  For us, when we hear the word “breakfast,” the first image that comes to mind are waffles with bacon or sausage and eggs, and maybe some fruits.  Considering this time of the year, a lot of what is being grown is squash and mushrooms and both are not very breakfast friendly foods (breakfast friendly foods in our opinion are foods that require very little preparation in the morning). However, after further discussion as a group, and recalling our conversation with Robin, we decided to include the farmers that would have more breakfast appropriate foods available later in the year (such as fresh fruits).  

Week of February 20^th-March 3^rd

• Start calling the farmers by regions to see if they are interested in potentially donating some of their products to local schools
• Visit two local Farmers’ Market to hand out Breakfast Club of Canada cards and connect with farmers, using the B.C. Farmers’ Food Donation Tax Credit as an incentive to donate to BCC schools

Achievements

We are still in the process of calling farmers to see if they are interested in donating any of their produce to any of the local Breakfast Club of Canada schools that are near them.  We plan to have contacted roughly half of the farmers on our directory  by March 2nd in order to show Robin what we have completed thus far and to address any questions or concerns that have come up during the contacting process, for our third meeting on March 6th.

We visited one of the two Farmer’s Market that is still currently open is Hastings Park and spoke to some of the local farmers. We mentioned the newly implemented B.C. Farmers’ Food Donation Tax Credit and left them with a BCC business card to contact Robin if they were interested in pursuing the program.  A few of the farmers were receptive, however, will need some time to think about it.  Hopefully we will hear back from them soon!

What?
For our second meeting, although it was very chaotic in the morning trying to maneuver through the traffic and transit in the snow, we still made it there alive! The meeting went well, however, as the weeks go by, we are starting to feel uncertain and anxious about our first calls to the farmers.  Robin made it look very easy to cold call a farmer and have them provide their contact information. Which led us feeling very optimistic about the process. Unfortunately that optimism was met with the reality of our first few calls. The farmers that have been contacted either didn’t answer or not interested in donating their products.  In addition, one of our group member’s meeting with the Farmer’s Market farmers did not go as well as we had hoped, and many were hesitant to give their contact information, however we hope that with the Breakfast Club of Canada cards that were handed out to them, they would be able to reach out soon.  Even though, these hurdles seem discouraging, we are hopeful we can overcome them as we still have over a hundred more farmers to contact, and a great support team from our community partner  Robin, our instructor Will, and our teaching assistant Carrie!

 

So What?
Our first few calls to farmers and attending the Farmer’s Market did pose as hurdle for our group, leaving us feeling a bit discouraged and more uncertain of the final outcome of our project. However,  as Tim Harford explains in his TED Talk of a pianist with a broken piano,“messes can inspire creativity,”.  In the TED talk, the pianist overcame this barrier and it led them to be more creative, in the end, having a successful tour.  This talk also showed us that the uncertainty we are seeing with our initial hurdles is a good thing as messes and uncertainty forces us to focus and pay more attention, building to our learning and expand our creativity (Harford, 2016). In relation to our first few calls not going according to plan, we forced ourselves to really reassess how we were approaching farmers in the phone calls. We agreed that we need to be more confident and positive when speaking with the farmers, as this is an organization that we believe in as well. This is an opportunity for our group to leave a lasting impression with farmers and hopefully contribute to a decline in students hunger prior to starting their first class in the morning.

Now What?

We plan to use problem solving strategies that incorporate our small “messes”, to re-evaluate our approaches on how we were calling the farmers (i.e. calling them during the week as suppose to the weekends). As for the farmers at the Farmer’s Market, we plan to visit a larger Farmer’s Market as a group to introduce our project and how the B.C. Farmers’ Food Donation Tax Credit would be an incentive to them. We hope that by attending the Farmer’s Market as a group, this would show the farmers that we care about this project. To help us with figuring out how to overcome these hurdles, we plan to use a pre-mortem as described in the Freakonomics’ “Failure is Your Friend” podcast.  A pre-mortem is when we assume that the project has failed and we retrace the steps to see where the project would fail. By doing this, it can help us reduce any over-confidence that we have and will increase participation from our group mates who have not expressed any ideas yet (Freakonomics, 2015).

Upcoming Objectives
Our upcoming objectives include contacting all the farmers in the following regions by March 2^nd, 2017:

• Abbotsford
• Aldergrove, Surrey, Burnaby, Delta, Matsqui, Sicamous, Summerland
• Chilliwack, Maple Ridge, Langley, Mission, Agassiz
• Quesnel, Prince George, Vanderhoof, Fort Steele, Willow River, Fort George, Grand Forks, Chase, Merritt
• Kelowna, Kamloops, Vernon, Okanagan, Westbank, Salmon Arm, Armstrong
• Nanaimo, Parksville, Salt Spring, Courtenay, Ladysmith, Nanoose Bay, Saanich, Victoria, Lantzville

To Visit the Nat Bailey Farmer’s Market as a small group by March 11^th, 2017

Strategies to Achieve Them

In total, there are 6 regions with 20 farms total, each member in the group will be responsible for contacting the 20 farms in the region, which they have signed up for on March 2nd.  As some of these regions are considered “long distance calling,” we have asked group members who have Canada-Wide calling on their phone plans to kindly take regions that require “long distance calling.”  Calling will be done individually at their convenience.  However, since this needs to be completed by the end of the day on March 2nd, we will not be running into the trouble of calling the farmers on the weekends when they might be busy with their families.

As the Nat Bailey Farmer’s Market is only once a week on Saturdays, we hope to visit them on March 4th or March 11th. We will be deciding this together on our Whatsapp Group Chat of who is available to attend.

Stay tuned to see how our adventure is going!  We are all very excited that the project is starting to get rolling!

 

References
Freakonomics. (2015, May 20). Failure Is Your Friend: A Freakonomics Radio Rebroadcast [Audio file]. Retrieved from http://freakonomics.com/podcast/failure-is-your-friend-a-freakonomics-radio-rebroadcast/

Hartford, Tim. (2016, January 17). How Messy Problems Can Inspire Creativity [Video file]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jd_j_kw_jZQ&feature=youtu.be.