Executive Summary of our final report:

According to Vancouver’s Greenest City 2020 Action Plan the local food goal is to increase the food security of its neighbourhoods 50% by 2020 (City of Vancouver, 2015). Community kitchens, where groups of people come together to cook and share meals together, are one of the options to increase the food access and security. The neighbourhood of Killarney was assessed for how many community kitchens it had and what the impact they had on the food access of its residents. The two main objectives of this study were to identify the condition and current usage of the community kitchens, and the types of programs provided through these kitchens. Killarney churches and potential candidate locations were contacted and a standard survey for data collection from the City of Vancouver was used for analysis. The survey given to each community kitchen will give insight of our objectives along with an inquiry question of “Do the types of infrastructure and programs provided by a community kitchen impact the ability of citizens to get access to food?” Two kitchens were interviewed during this process. Both kitchens surveyed were located in churches, one was industrial and the other a domestic style kitchen. The churches had separate views for development of the kitchens. Grace Church would like to expand their kitchen but are met by barriers of food and city regulations, while Killarney Park Church needs more members and staff for the facility usage to increase productivity. Both churches were limited by funding to accomplish their goals. Recommendations for the community kitchens were to build stronger networks with the residents to improve the usage of kitchens, create a source of funding for expansion, and enable a greater food accessibility for Killarney residents which use these community kitchens as part of their food system. As a group we learned that the synergy of academic and community based partners allows for an exchange of research and experience, which together has a greater impact on meeting the Greenest City 2020 Action Plan goal.

A moment of significance:

What:

Finishing our first survey is considered as one of the significant moments for our project. We have contacted many places that might have community kitchens, such as community centres, churches and school. However, the responses we received were disappointed. After all the waiting, we decided to visit Killarney in person in order to discover kitchens facilities there. Churches were the targets in this visit. We arrived at Killarney community centre first and then searched for nearby churches. Killarney Park Church was the first church we visited and finished the survey. It was much easier than we thought to find kitchen facilities before we actually visited personally. The person who was in charge of that church was friendly and willing to participate in our project. After signing letter of consent, we took few pictures about the infrastructures and asked some questions.

So What:

What we learnt from finding and contacting community kitchens was to visit places in person. It was much useful than contacting kitchens by phones and emails, and waiting for their responses. We thought visiting in person was convincing since we were able to explain what we were doing to the person who is in charge of the place.

Now What:

In order to make the project better, we could improve by finding more community kitchens and spending more time to do surveys. We visited Killarney when we had flexible learning sessions, and we only visited limited kitchens since priest were at rest on Monday. It would be better if we go there on Sunday and explore more community kitchens. With more data, we could do a more complete comparison between different kitchens and were able to answer the question we had in the project.