ABOUT US
Hi, this is Poonam Dattani. I’m a second year student in the faculty of Land and Food Systems, majoring in FNH. I like baking, dancing, playing badminton, and singing
Hi! My name is Agnes-Sophia Arbuah and I am in my third year of the Food, Nutrition and Health Major. I enjoy dancing, cooking, and sharing nutrition information with others.
Pearl Cicci, also a nutrition major, likes dancing, hiking, and experiencing the food of different cultures.
Hey this is Alice Wu, another third year student in land and food system nutrition major, I like baking, enjoys sweets, like to dance and meet new people.
I’m Pierre Looper, in my last year at UBC studying Food Market Analysis in the FNH program. During my free time I enjoy playing soccer and basketball as well as gardening and traveling.
GROUP 15 Interests, Goals, and reasons for choosing our project
We would like to gather insight into the city’s community kitchens, while strengthening our abilities to critically analyze situations and engaging with the community. We are also looking forward to interact with professionals working on similar projects, whilst making a positive impact on the community.
Our common interests are nutrition, healthy living and contributing to the community. Through this project we are excited to explore and expand on food assets.
Looking into community kitchens is a valuable approach because it allows us to gain diverse perspectives from the various community members that utilize the kitchen space. Not only are community kitchens a place to cook and share food, they also provide a common space for people to socialize. Because of this, we are all eager to meet with various people who are impacted by these community kitchens! It is through the community that we will gain the essential knowledge to help the kitchens reach their full potential.
Objectives of Our Partner
Our community organization, in partnership with The City of Vancouver, aims to gain more knowledge and collect data from community kitchens. This data will be used to inform the Vancouver Food Strategy on how to better distribute funds. Areas of focus include functionality, availability, accessibility and cleanliness. We hope to achieve this by visiting various community kitchens in the West End of Vancouver.
1st Impressions
We had our first meeting with our community partner, Sarah Carten, on September 23rd, 2015. She was very helpful and allowed us become more familiar with the expectations of the project. Sarah explained to us that we will be interacting with a variety of people in different communities. Initially, we did not get much information about our project but we are eager to interact with people and try our best to help them with the data we collect. Ernesto Sirolli’s TED talk was very insightful, because it shows how effective listening to the local people really is. We can use this way of thinking when we are talking to the people and trying to gather information from them. We need to present ourselves as friendly people that are there to listen and to help them. Ensuring them we will actually help them and not hinder them. This also ties into Asset Based Community Development, with the idea that we can utilize what the community already has and work off of that. One main asset to communities are people themselves. The locals of the communities have years of knowledge that we can definitely use to help them improve their situations.
Overall, as a group we cannot wait to get out there and gather this knowledge from all the people.