Our group will be working closely with Ray-Cam Cooperative Community Centre over the course of this CBEL Project. Ray-Cam is a non-profit organization that is based in East Vancouver. Their organization is actively involved in their local community, providing a wide range of programs and services for both families and individuals. Their programs help provide community members with educational, recreational, social, cultural and economic skills and knowledge with the goal of helping them make successful and fulfilling life choices. Ray-Cam is particularly involved with youth in the community, providing many programs specifically for children, teens and young adults. Ray-Cam runs a community centre on E. Hastings St. where many of their projects are initiatives are run out of.  Our CBEL group will be working with Ray-Cam on their Home Grown Wall Project.

The Home Grown Wall Project is an initiative that resulted from the success of Ray-Cam’s Food Wall demonstration in which Ray-Cam was able to successfully grow a large number of vegetables using a vertical garden. For the Home Grown Wall Project, Ray-Cam wants to build one hundred smaller vertical gardens that will be scaled down to be able to fit on balconies and in smaller yards. They will then distribute these gardens to different community members to provide families and individuals with a sustainable and renewable food source. Ray-Cam has invited our group to help design and prototype these wall gardens as a part of our CBEL Project. By the end of this term, our goal is to have completed a final copy of the design and to possibly construct a prototype if time permits.

The major design considerations of these vertical gardens include the cost of the materials, the mobility of the gardens, and the implementation of a proper irrigation system. The cost of the materials must be kept to a minimum otherwise Ray-Cam will be unable to afford to manufacture as many gardens as they want to. The mobility of the gardens is also very important as Ray-Cam wants to be able to distribute the gardens to community members as quickly as possible after manufacturing them. Collapsible frames or placing wheels on the base of the gardens are design options that will subsequently be considered. The most challenging aspect of the design will likely be the irrigation system. A vertical garden format makes it challenging to evenly water and irrigate all of the crops growing on the wall. As a result, our group will need to find a solution that will allow the owners of these gardens to be able to water all of their plants effectively.

In order to achieve all of these goals, our group will need to work well together in order to optimize our time and efficiency. We plan on doing this by meeting weekly to discuss the progress of the project. At these meetings, we determine which phase of the project we are currently working on in relation to accomplishing our goals. At the end of every meeting, we assign each group member tasks that they need to complete before our next weekly meeting. By organizing our team in this manner, each member knows what is expected of him or her and our team as a whole is able to stay focused and on track towards reaching our goals.