Executive Summary

The Hastings Sunrise Community Food Network’s (HSCFN) main objective is to enhance and develop a more localized and accessible food system in the Hastings Sunrise region. Team 4 of LFS 350 has been tasked to work with the Hastings Community Learning Garden (HCLG) within the HSCFN. This research project has arisen out of a need to better connect local residents with the HCLG due to the fact that there is currently little if any involvement and participation at workshops/programs offered. Community involvement is important to build capacity at the individual and community level as a strategy to combat community food security.

The project objectives were to learn about practices being used by other community gardens/food-skill workshops in the HSCFN. To evaluate various success factors, and to provide this information back to HCLG for further identification of current “gaps” in order to learn from best practice to boost local community involvement at the garden. To support our objectives, three main inquiry questions were made: What are other community organizations doing at their gardens? What do they identify as their strengths (Do these organizations believe what they are doing is successful?) Are there parallels between community gardens in terms of barrier to participation?

The research methodology was quantitative, centered on in-person interviews with HSCFN stakeholders. A total of nine questions were asked to support the above inquiry questions. Resulting data was analyzed by isolating similar concepts and making descriptive codes for each respectively. These codes were grouped together to form themes, and emerging themes provided success factors to overall community participation.

Results showed that many similar themes were found amongst the interviewed HSCFN stakeholders. The first inquiry had common themes such as: offering a variety of programs and workshops, having private or public participation and considering the visual appeal of the garden. The themes associated with the second inquiry questions was: multiple methods of advertisement; collaboration of programs and workshops; parental and volunteer involvement. The last inquiry question had themes of culture/language and funding.

Future recommendations to the HCLG include recruiting volunteers and staff who are multilingual as Hastings Sunrise is multilingual, utilizing mixed-methods approach to advertising, and collaborating with different HSCFN members, all while capitalizing a strong network of food initiatives within the HS community.

Moment of Significance

What

Looking back at the last three months, our group felt that we have learned so much from the LFS 350 class. This course has given us the opportunity to work at a community-based setting, where we have to gather information related to food security issues from the community stakeholders, make analysis and present our final results and pull recommendations using asset-based concepts. Being able to go out into the ‘real world’ and working with a ‘real’ community to help them solve a pressing issue had allowed the group to apply the knowledge we gained from inside the classroom. In between the process, we went through many scope changes, challenges and milestones, but our most significant moment is the completion of the project on a high note.

Overall, it was an exciting and rewarding experience as we got the chance to share what we have learned in the community and share this knowledge with fellow LFS 350 students as well as our community partners. During this period, everyone in our group is busy preparing for the upcoming final examination, and yet we are glad that our final presentation result exceeded our expectation. It shows that our collaboration and commitment as a team has produced a satisfying outcome.

So What

This experience relates to the Rheingold’s TED Talk about the power of collaboration. In the video, he concluded that cooperation, collective action, and complex interdependencies play important roles in making progression (Rheingold, 2005). It highlights the importance of sharing ideas, collaboration of information as well as the power of cooperation in conducting a project. As a team, we were very fortunate to be placed in a project where we can, as a group, collectively make contributions towards solving the local food security issue. The complexity of the food systems prove more challenging than we had initially anticipated. Although it was a very challenging experience, as this project requires a lot of dedication and commitment from each team member as well as our community partners, we have gained collective knowledge about the importance of community project and issues related to it that we would probably never learned in class. In addition, without the support from our course coordinators, TAs, and community partners, our group would not have been able to complete such a big project and gained so much knowledge in the process. Overall, the project was an eye-opening experience about the real world situation! We were able to share and collaborate ideas to identify the needs and wants of the community.

Now What

Moving forward, the idea of commitment and collaboration that came out of this course will be a great help for us in the future when doing a community project. Solving community issues by using collaboration has proven to be very effective if combined with a positive attitude. In conclusion, this learning experience had taught the group to connect our individualities and strengths and come together as a group to tackle community issues.

Works Cited

Rheingold, H.(2005, February). Howard Rheingold: The new power of collaboration. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/howard_rheingold_on_collaboration?language=en