Blog Post 3 – Group 22

This is our update for a very preparation-orientated couple of weeks. Since one of the community focus groups had to be cancelled due to low registration, our current discussion has been revolving around how we can most effectively get people interested in this project. We will hopefully achieve this by creating an informative and thought-provoking poster and engaging the community in discussion during the upcoming Vancouver Farmers Market in Hastings Sunrise. We are excited to attend the Farmer’s Market and take some of the knowledge we have gained from the focus groups, and from lecture, and use it to try to get more people involved! Although this project is very needs-based, we are excited to direct the project towards a more asset-based form of community development by introducing ideas of community information sharing (ie. cooking knowledge and recipes).

Ongoing Objectives

• Continuing to prepare for the Vancouver Farmers Market in Hastings Sunrise on March 12th by creating an information board, an interactive activity and a mailing list sign-up sheet to provide to the market crowd.

Achievements

• Attended a Focus Group on March 8th, gaining insight into the needs of the community.
• Focus Group questions were reformulated to remove redundancy.
• We had a meeting with Alex to go over what would be the best way to present to the community at the Farmers Market

Reflection on Group Moments of Significance:

The past week we reflected on our group’s moments of significance throughout our experience working on our community project. It was interesting to see how each of our group members felt during different moments of significance. We found that we all had a common idea of what was significant, but experienced those moments differently as either positive or negative (figure 2). This shows that we all have unique experiences of the same events and thus we should communicate about how we interpreted each moment to offer a diverse range of perspective. For example, meeting Joanne was an early moment of significance that we all had different reactions to. Some people felt that the meeting clarified how to go about our project, others felt more confusion in what was expected of our group. This was important as moving forward we now know how important it is to frequently check-in with each other because what may seem like an obvious thought or reaction to one of us, may be experienced in a completely opposite way by someone else. Fortunately, when we graphed our skill/knowledge levels vs. the moments of significance, we found that all of us have increased our knowledge and skills by working on this project (figure 1). The CFC reporting back meeting at the end of January for all of us, as our first experience in the field of this project, positively boosted our sense of awareness of what this project was about and our attitude towards it.

Figure 1: Knowledge/skills vs Time.

Figure 2: Emotions vs. Time

Graceful Dismount

Our strategy hinges on holding to our objectives which are: to hear from community members by creating opportunities to interact with them during the Farmers Market and in focus groups, and to suggest implementable projects. We hope that our market stand activity this Sunday will further direct us in achieving our final objectives. Our goals on Sunday will be to learn from the community in making contact with them, to recruit the final focus group members, and to hear their ideas of what a new implementable project might look like. While we will definitely be brainstorming future implementable projects based on the data from the focus groups, we know our interactive activity will bring out ideas that are locally appropriate that we will not have thought of. Who better to suggest new food programming for the community centre than the community itself? Reaching out to people to join our focus groups as well as seeking their advice for what is possible in the neighbourhood at the market stand will be an excellent opportunity to apply the principles of asset-based community development in the field (Mathie and Cunningham 2003).

For our next and final blog, we will discuss how the market stand went, how we planned for the focus group that was missed, and how we were able to use what we learned in the community and the focus groups to think about what next steps are needed to further understand and address food security in Hastings-Sunrise.

Resources

Mathie, A., & Cunningham, G. (2003). From clients to citizens: Asset-based community development as a strategy for community-driven development. Development in Practice, 13(5), 474-486. doi:10.1080/0961452032000125857