Project Progress 3

 Sometimes we all find ourselves feeling a bit low and don’t have much motivation to face the day. With our busy lives filled with work, travel, and school, it is hard to keep an upbeat view about everything without getting worn out. Ever since we finished our surveys at Little Mountain Riley Park, our team’s motivation has been decreasing. As we stated in our last post, collecting responses for our survey proved much more difficult than we originally thought. With no events for our group to go to, our morale dropped lower and lower. Thankfully, the lecture and tutorial gave us the knowledge and chance to boost our morale back up.

 

 This week in our lecture we got to hear from every TA and some challenges they faced when they were working. Our TA, Latika Rasinghani, told us about her experience transitioning from India to Canada and how sometimes we may feel very pressured to achieve higher goals. She also brought to our attention the benefits of making sure our group dynamics are functioning well. It was also important to make sure that any present tensions are resolved so that we may continue working together effectively.  

 

 In our tutorial we charted how we are all feeling to compare with one another.  Based on the sharing within the group, we found that there are several moments where we felt the same way. No matter what expectations we had about the course at the beginning, we were all very excited after we met each other. We felt very happy forming this group and we looked forward to all that we were going to do in the next three months. After our first meeting with our community partner (Joanne), we felt a little disappointed because of the unclear objective of the project. That changed however, after the second meeting and everyone was happy with that. The proposal presentation we did in the tutorial session got us some positive feedback which made us feel that we were on the right track, but the mark really affected us after. Later, we did our survey at the Sustenance Festival for the project. Some of us felt down for not getting much useful data and others were content with what we had already and participated in the festival gladly. Due to the lack of data, we cannot draw solid conclusions to give Joanne and her team. Now, with our plans set on how to move forward, most of us are satisfied with our current situation.

Our team's happiness plotted over time with how each significant point affected our happiness

Our team’s happiness plotted over time with how each significant point affected our happiness

Even though we all feel slightly different, we still have the same goal of finishing on a positive note. As we continue working on our outline of the operations manual for the community garden, we are keeping a few things in mind to help us reach our positive end goal. We are making sure what we are doing can be completed within the time frame, and at the same time, we are making sure this is congruent with our team’s goals and visions. Most importantly, we are also keeping in mind Joanne and her team’s goals and visions as we want to help her achieve what she envisioned for LIttle Mountain Riley Park. What our end goal is, is not only to deliver the outline of the operations manual for Joanne and her committee, but to also lay out the groundwork for whatever team may be continuing this project later on. For further data collection, we realised that surveys are very limiting. We would suggest that further data collection about the community garden be done with personal interviews with board members or people with community garden experience as that would be much more beneficial.   

 

 It has been a long 2 months since we began our projects and the end is already in our sights. We feel as though we are now stronger as a group after the recent activities done in the tutorials. We have a better understanding of our goals and also the vision that we hope to achieve by the end. Even if we do come across setbacks in our projects, we need to be able to face them head-on, and together as a group, and we feel that our group is indeed ready to do so.

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