Month: January 2012

After our initial meeting with Marty, he sent us an email with the contact information of the three agencies we will be assisting.  They are:

• Silver Harbour Seniors’ Activity Centre
• Capilano Community Services Society
• West Vancouver’s Seniors’ Activity Centre

Linus, as our Client Liaison, contacted each agency.  He successfully reached the first two agencies on our list, but had some issues with West Vancouver due to some conflicts in time; he is currently working on that situation while we focus on the other two groups first.  After talking with their representatives, it became clear that the needs of each agency were unique; for example, it seems that Capilano is willing to just provide us with maps and statistics of their bus routes for our team to put in the report, whereas Silver Harbour would like us to actually ride on their buses.

This week, we were only able to schedule a meeting with Annwen Loverin, the Executive Director of Silver Harbour.  On Thursday, Calvin and Michael met with her in North Vancouver to discuss her expectations for this project.  At the bottom is a picture of the inside of the Silver Harbour Seniors’ Centre. Their current system, the “Go Bus,” runs on Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays.  Although the agency will provide records of routes and ridership, Ms. Loverin feels that the report would be more complete if our group spent time riding the buses and recording our own data as well.  The findings will then be compared with the given records to make a more complete report.  She also noted that it would be ideal for us to come at least two of the days, as the Tuesday route is quite different from the other two.  This poses a challenge to our group, because our schedules make it hard to take time off during weekdays.  Also, it takes over an hour by transit to travel from UBC to the Silver Harbour Seniors’ Centre.

On Friday, we will meet up to discuss which days to go and ride on the Silver Harbour buses.  For next week, our main objectives are:

1. Contact and arrange a meeting with the West Vancouver agency
2. Go ride the buses at Silver Harbour
3. Meet with the Capilano Agency (Linus has scheduled a meeting on Jan. 31)

Our CSL project team consists of Andre Dratwa, Michael Elder, Lindsay Jennings, Ava Li, Calvin Lui, and Linus Yau, all second-year Civil Engineering students.  Although some of us already know each other from before, Monday was the first day we officially met together as a group.  During this session, team roles were assigned, and are as follows:

• Andre – Leader
• Linus – Client Liaison
• Michael – Mentor Liaison
• Lindsay – Note taker
• Calvin – Blogger
• Ava – Documents and Files Keeper

In this time, we were also introduced to our mentor, Roein Manafi.  Roein is a third-year Mechanical Engineering student, and his experiences while working on a CSL project this past summer will be invaluable to our group’s success.

Our client is Better Environmentally Sound Transportation (BEST), a non-profit organization that was founded in 1991.  Their focus is on promoting sustainable transportation in the Greater Vancouver Area.  One of their projects at the moment is the Seniors Transportation, Access, and Resources (STAR) initiative.  The purpose of this venture is to “assist urban, rural, and remote agencies in helping seniors to age in place” (STAR Canada, 2011).  One of the ways they are doing this is by providing transportation services for the elderly.  However, this part of the program is still in its infancy.

Our project team has been given the task of gathering and analyzing some data for three seniors’ agencies involved in STAR in the North Vancouver area.  Our findings will be submitted to BEST in the form of a report and also a presentation at one of their board meetings.  The expected completion date of this project is late February.

On Tuesday, we visited the BEST office, to meet with Marty Frost, the representative from the organization we will be in contact with.  A picture of the office building is shown below.  During this meeting, some of the details of the project were discussed.  Most importantly, we were informed that we will need to visit each to the three agencies in North Vancouver sometime in the next few weeks, in order to collect data.  Our main task this week will be to get in contact with these agencies.

The purpose of this post is to gain familiarity with the function of this site blog.

→This is an offset point with the greek symbol Σ contained in it.

 
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