Introduction:

“It’s clear that agriculture, done right, is the best means the world has today to simultaneously tackle food security, poverty, and environmental degradation.” – Irene Rosenfeld

Food insecurity is closely tied to a healthy agriculture system. Storage, as an extension, is a way to ensure that the agricultural system is able to properly distribute its crops. With the proposal now behind us, we have engaged in our research into plausible storage solutions. There are a plethora of options available, and now our challenge is to narrow down into acceptable solutions that can be utilized by the Pakistani province, Punjab. Delving into journal articles and using our community partner’s experience and knowledge with less-than-successful options will merit us the chance to provide feasible options for the Pakistan communities.

Weekly Objectives, Achievements, & Strategies

Week 6 – February 20th to 26th (Reading Week)

Objectives

• Submit second blog post.
• Contact LET’S representative, Saadan Sulehri, regarding contact with Punjab representatives.

Achievements

• Completed and submitted second blog post
• Received and reviewed submitted proposal feedback.
• Acquired the LET’S Punjab Team’s interview response regarding storage resources. Was able to establish current conditions in Punjab to understand the necessary what community member’s currently utilize.

Week 7 – February 27th to March 5th

Objectives

• Begin research into plausible storage solutions.
• Contact Saadan for feedback on proposal to ensure we are on the correct path.
• Begin outlining information for third blog post.

Achievements

• Distribute tasks for final project.
• Individually submitted Thesis Statements for Academic & Experiential Review Paper.
• Organized information collected from interview.
• Collaboratively worked on the Moments of Significant Change.

Week 8 – March 6th – 12th

Objectives

• Edit and submit third blog post.
• Revise proposal feedback to be incorporated into final project.

Achievements

• Submitted third blog post.
• Begin assembling information in first draft of final project.

Moments of Significant Change

What is this?

In last week’s tutorial section (Week 7) our TA, Colin, led us through a workshop known as Moments of Significant Change. In this workshop, we reflected on the progress of our project, identified moments of notable changes, and acknowledged impacts on our skills and experiences as well as on our emotions. The graphs below were created in the workshop as a way to express the trends of the impacts throughout our time working on this project.

Skills and Experiences

The graph on the above shows the skills and knowledge developments that, collectively, we feel were most pronounced in our time in this course. For the most part of our project, we believe the future will lead to an overall upwards trend. In group collaboration, as whole we believe that we have successfully enhanced our interpersonal skills through utilizing our group’s strengths. Every member of our group has been willing to take on work, supply sound feedback, create and meet deadlines, as well as engage in strong communication among other members. Our research skills have generally improved. The dip is mostly due to our ignorance towards grey literature and peer-reviewed; we suspected most government sourced information was reliable and study-based only to find out that it is considered grey literature. ABCD’s, or asset-based community development, was a previously unknown concept to our group. With the literature and lectures, we have been on an upward trend of coming to understand this concept. Lastly, our proposal wr

What is this?

In last week’s tutorial section (Week 7) our TA, Colin, led us through a workshop known as Moments of Significant Change. In this workshop, we reflected on the progress of our project, identified moments of notable changes, and acknowledged impacts on our skills and experiences as well as on our emotions. The graphs below were created in the workshop as a way to express the trends of the impacts throughout our time working on this project.

Skills and Experiences

The graph on the top shows the skills and knowledge developments that, collectively, we feel were most pronounced in our time in this course. For the most part of our project, we believe the future will lead to an overall upwards trend. In group collaboration, as whole we believe that we have successfully enhanced our interpersonal skills through utilizing our group’s strengths. Every member of our group has been willing to take on work, supply sound feedback, create and meet deadlines, as well as engage in strong communication among other members. Our research skills have generally improved. The dip is mostly due to our ignorance towards grey literature and peer-reviewed; we suspected most government sourced information was reliable and study-based only to find out that it is considered grey literature. ABCD’s, or asset-based community development, was a previously unknown concept to our group. With the literature and lectures, we have been on an upward trend of coming to understand this concept. Lastly, our proposal writing skills as a whole were not necessarily strong coming into the LFS course. We were confident in submission of our proposal, only to lose some momentum as a result of our feedback. As a whole, we believe that our feedback going into the future will supply us stronger skills in the future.

Emotions

Collaboratively, we have had less of a trend in our emotions in comparison to the skills and experience. In expectancy, or how our anticipation has been in terms of the course, we are fairly volatile. In relation to this subject, we associated our stress levels and what we expected to learn as a part of this. With most courses entering the busiest part of the semester currently, we are sensitive in response, and this results in the dip. Another part associated with this subject for us, is our assumption of being closely involved with the community for our project. Since our project is mostly independent, we have felt we lack the connection to the community and their perspectives that we have witnessed from other projects. We suspect that our emotions will improve once we are able discern how our project can be utilized. The inner conflict, or how we have handled ourselves and our feelings, has increased due to the increasing demand of other courses and incorporating extracurricular activities in addition to this project. We’re currently feeling run-down due to just being off reading break, midterm season, as well as poor weather. With the end of the term, we presume with the closing of the semester we will be in better conditions. Our motivation looks like rolling waves due to bouts of other life obligations that have come our way. The last, is our feelings toward LFS. This course, to us, is considerably more independent than the previous core program courses. While we appreciate and value the experiences we have gained from our community partner project, overall the LFS course has been on a downward trend to us. With our community project, we are disappointed that we won’t be able to see the results from our project or how it’s implemented, the lack of engagement from the community we are basing our project on as well as the feedback directly from the public.

The Graceful Dismount Strategy

In order to successfully complete our project, we have been adamant on managing our time and distributing tasks evenly among group members. With setting deadlines for certain parts of our project, we can guarantee that our project can be submitted on time. We will continue to maintain open communication where progress updates can be conveyed. Using Google Docs, we are able to monitor and assimilate all information into one document rather than have to amalgamate all the information to assure coherence among the project. Overall, for our graceful dismount, our strategy involves respecting one another and open channels of communication. Relaying our information to our community partner will provide us with feedback that enables us to carry out the best project possible.