Welcome back to group 4! During the past few weeks, we have made some progress toward our final project. As a group, we have learnt to use our strength to accomplish tasks collaboratively. The biggest achievements so far are finishing our final proposal and interviewing one of the employees in the legion. We will put effort into achieving our objectives and further engaging with Grandview legion food system for the next few weeks.
Click here to see our project proposal! |
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THIS WEEK’S OBJECTIVE AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Objective
- Have our first meeting with our community partner!
- Assess the state of kitchen infrastructure by gathering information on who can use it, what type of preparation tools exist, how often it is used and the waste disposal practices.
- Discover Grandview legions specific goals, community interactions and initiatives from an employee’s perspective.
Achievements
- Visited Grandview legion.
Although we were unable to interact with community members, we did have a 15-minute interview (voice recorded) with a staff member, Danielle. We were able to gather information on food-related activities conducted at the legion and certain food practices of the legion members.
- Looked around the legion, and took photographs of the area and written observations of the members and facilities.
One of the key take away points from Miewald and Ostry’s (2014) paper is that in addressing issues of food security for vulnerable populations, it is important to not only identify infrastructural issues i.e. “more than walls and a roof” but we must also identify food preparation assets. This is one of the major reasons we were sure to identify the food preparation assets that our legion had during our visit, in order to give us more insight into the potential of the legion to positively contribute to addressing food security.
- Assessed the state of the kitchen infrastructure, taking detailed notes of the facilities.
- Team bonding! The closer our group is, the more capable we are of successfully executing this project.
- Completed final copy of proposal for our group project.
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What3 What? So What? Now What?
What?
A significant moment for our group this week was the official site-visit to Grandview legion and the interview we had with Danielle. During the site-visit, we found that Grandview legion was very different from what we initially thought. Rather than a quiet and cold place we had imagined before, it was quite busy. After conducting a 15-minute interview with Danielle, a bartender who has worked there for 3 years, we have learned that people who go to the legion usually bring their own food and mostly just come for the drinks, and the majority of the customers have good mobility and vibrant social connections at the legion. The legion had a well equipped and functioning kitchen that is not used on a regular basis but is open for special events or when the legion is rented out for functions.
So What?
Based on what we were told and observed, our direction has become more clear. Just as many social studies and researches, such as Learning to see food justice (Dixon,2014) and Point of View Affects How Science Is Done (Bang, 2014), pointed out, it is necessary to do an in-depth and community-specific observation, even an assessment for any social related study and decision.
Community-Based Experiential Learning is our foundation to explore the real-case in the world, and gain the practical experience from the reality rather than more formal classroom learning. Thinking about our own critical analysis of our reactions and thoughts to the site visit we realized that it is essential for our project progress because academic study should be applied to community reality, instead of being isolated and disconnected as only academic hypotheses. Although many legions may share common characteristics, they each have their own unique features; therefore, it is vital to adapt a community-based approach. From the interview, we got information about many community events that the legion has been involved, which gave us a more comprehensive understanding of the interaction between the legion and the community. As a group, we reflected on the fact that as we were conducting our interview all of us found ourselves thinking about the importance of our relationship as young university students with the surrounding communities and actually how little throughout our degrees thus far we have been given or taken the time to reach outside of the UBC community. It’s easy to get caught up in our own lives but making connections and engaging with people maybe outside of our comfort zone is able to expand our minds and teach us about things we maybe would have never gotten the opportunity to learn about otherwise. This visit also encouraged us to begin reflecting a little bit more on our experience as a group so far, and the fact that none of us knew each other before this group project began. According to Tim Harford (2016), uncertainty and working with classmates who are strangers is found to be beneficial, as it requires more focus and attention, which has the potential to increase learning, creativity, and achievement. We do feel that although this has been challenging for us, it has also helped to solve problems better. For example, it we have found that it forces us to be more creative with our ideas and be able to communicate them for clearly as we can not make any assumptions about the intentions, backgrounds or strengths of other individuals within the group. This was especially true when we were reflecting on our visit with our community partner. It was interesting to see all the different ways each group member interpreted the experience and the potential that we each saw in the legions assets, along with our creative ideas on what could be done with them.
Now What?
Based on all the available information we have gathered over the past few weeks, we will now concentrate on performing our assessment of the Grandview legion’s facilities that will potentially be a very important part of achieving both the legions organizational goals as well as for engaging with the wider community. We will work on analyzing the operations that occur within the legion, such as food related events, and community engagements. Via these community-strength-based improvements we will now push ourselves to think critically about some of the broader issues need to be considered if our actions are to be successful, not only do these issues of food security and food justice impact our small area of Grandview but also problems of vulnerability that so many other citizens of Vancouver face. This evokes thoughts that might challenge some the dominant thought process that these kinds of issues do not happen in our own country. With food assistance and other developmental initiatives usually going abroad sometimes we forget about those in our own backyards. Some of the consequences of these actions that we plan to take in engaging with the Grandview legion will hopefully contribute to some larger positive consequences, enhancing connections at many points in the community and encouraging people to engage with each other in meaningful ways through food and begin to think about their own initiatives for combating food insecurity.
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UPCOMING OBJECTIVE AND STRATEGIES
Upcoming Objectives and Strategies
- Manage and control the scope of our project, narrow in on our strategy based off our meeting with our community partner.
- Begin our systems model. This is a representation of the legions food system and the surrounding community and how they interact and engage with one another. It’s important to start piecing this model together early and be able to build on it during the upcoming weeks.
- Build on our partnership with the legion. This can be achieved by participating in food related events held by the legion.
- Communicate with group members actively via email, google doc and social media, in order to be prepared for upcoming assignments and discuss our personal reflections on the past week
- Return to the Grandview community and perform the remainder of our interviews with community members.
- Incorporate the feedbacks we receive on our proposal report and revise it to draft our final copy.
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Work Cited
Bang, D. M., Carol D., & Lee, M. (2014). Point of View Affects How Science Is Done. Scientific American.
Dixon, B. A. (2014). Learning to see food justice. Agriculture and Human Values, 31(2), 175–184
Harford, T. (2016) How messy problems can inspire creativity. Ted Talk.
Miewald, C., & Ostry, A. (2014). A Warm Meal and a Bed: Intersections of Housing and Food Security in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside. Housing Studies, 29(6), 709–729.
LFS 350: GROUP 4 BLOG POST #2 Ivy Li Kelsey Welham Maryam AboMoslim Olivier Bernal Quinyang Xie Seraph Yu
