Hi everyone! We are well into the second week of October, marking our 6 weeks together as a project group. Most of those days were spent getting to know each other and brainstorming ideas for our project. Now that we have a project skeleton, it’s time to reflect on some of our achievements so far, and some upcoming goals and objectives!
Last week we worked effectively in co-writing a project proposal report then presented this group proposal to our TA Josh and fellow students. The teaching staff and our tutorial group gave us feedback and suggestions about the project. With their input, we adjusted and completed the project plan and made a clear schedule for the next few weeks of goals and deadlines.
This week, we plan to finish the following tasks: by Thursday, Oct 15th, each member needs to complete the CORE tutorial and emails the certificate to our TA Josh. By the next day, Oct 16th, the consent form will be filled out. We will determine a list of community garden coordinators to contact and divide tasks between group members by Saturday, Oct 17th.
It wasn’t always smooth sailing though…we definitely hit a couple bumps on the road to formulating a project plan. Beginning the term as a newly formed group, we found out very quickly that we all shared an interest in urban farming, nutrition, and empowering at-risk children and family in developing a healthy relationship with their food. Like one of the Vancouver’s Food Strategies, we wanted to develop a project that would ‘improve access to healthy, affordable, and culturally diverse foods for all residents’. However, there were many different and conflicting ideas on what our project was going to entail, as well as an extensive list of goals. Enthusiastic about developing a grand project that was able to empower residents, our group initially aimed to create an after school gardening program, writing a gardening manual and even a cook book!
Our ambitious plan was not practical. In order to make our project achievable, we narrowed down our ideas, and brought our focus onto one specific issue related to the accessibility of community gardens. After much brainstorming, we came to a consensus on developing a project that would improve the accessibility of community gardens to non-English speakers in the city, especially new immigrants. Since most of our group members are immigrants who learned English as a second language upon moving to Vancouver, we found this project very fitting, as we could relate to the challenges of not having access to multilingual resources. Just like Sisonke Msimang (2014), we could empathize with the new immigrants and non-English speakers of the city.
In order to collect a complete set of data and to obtain accurate information for our research, it will be crucial for us to aim in contacting one hundred percent of the community garden coordinators. We must ensure each community garden application and resource are thoroughly surveyed, in order to carry out the essential steps needed to improve the accessibility of community gardens for everyone.
There are upsides and downsides of the action we took to counterpart the difficulties we faced. For one, we will be able to finish the designed project on time by not doing complicated tasks, while focusing on getting a more accurate and reliable result from the data collected. However, it is possible that we cannot pay attention to other difficulties that non-native speakers have in their garden application process, such as cultural or other ethical differences.
Looking forward…
Our next objective is to complete formulating set of questions to ask community garden coordinators and to make a general outline of formal emails, which will be sent out to the coordinators by Tuesday, Oct 20. To achieve this, we will first brainstorm together as a group and then come up with some questions regarding the accessibility of community gardens for local residents. Specifically, we will bring up questions with respect to language barriers and its impact on community garden participation. We will ask the coordinators about the general demographic information of their communities. We will also inquire about the availability of multilingual applications. If their application forms are available only in English, we will assess how difficult it is to comprehend the application for new immigrants who barely speak English in their day-to-day life. After completing the questions, we will identify the community garden coordinators and find out their contact information online. Our last step is to contact them via email. We aim to contact as many community garden coordinators as possible because we cannot guarantee a 100% reply from all of them; besides, the more data we collect, the more reliable and accurate our result will be.
Our second upcoming objective is to actually start contacting community garden coordinators, gathering data and making appointments; we hope to eventually be able to visit some of these gardens in order to gain more data. Our strategy for that is to divide the community gardens by region and assign a region per team member, thus spreading out the work and assuring each community garden has a contact within our group. This will happen on October 21st. We will then put the feedbacks from the coordinators together, and pick out the community gardens that respond most positively to arrange consent for making visits. Then we will write out questions to ask when we make the site visits, interview people present at the gardens, and analyse our data based on our findings.
For the community gardens that we did not visit, we will simply use the information gathered from the original survey.