Objectives & Achievements

Week 7

• Collect information for free or subsidized groceries within UBC community by contacting potential community partners through email.
• Update and fill incomplete information in excel sheet that containing critical information for the Vancouver Food Asset Map

Week 8

• As a team, familiarize ourselves with the asset map by trialing and using it before starting the trailing process for the Food Asset Map.
• Do preparation for trailing of the Food Asset Map, which includes confirming a specific time during this week’s flexible learning session and confirming the collaboration with UBC community centers.

During week 7, we managed to complete our objectives. We are still waiting for more responses from community partners regarding their willingness to participate in the Vancouver Food Asset Map trial. We started calling them directly rather than waiting for them to email us back. However, out of the three community partners we have contacted, only the Old Barn Community Centre is willing to collaborate and trial the map with us. Originally in our proposal, we planned to conduct the trialling of the map on three locations on Main Mall, as this will will give us a large survey sample size. We have decided to postpone trialling the map because during Teya’s visit at our tutorial session, she mentioned that she wanted us to collaborate with multiple community centres at UBC for the trialling process. Given the current situation, we will need more time to approach community partners. Teya would also like to see the result from trialling the map in a community food event hosted by the community partner. Due to this change, Week 8 objectives needed to be postponed. We decided to continue updating the Excel sheets during our flexible learning time. We will keep contacting food assets to confirm that the information that we have are updated and whether or not they are willing to be included in the food asset map. We have been getting a lot of positive responses from food assets as most of them agreed to continue the collaboration with the Food Asset Map and the information is more complete than two weeks ago. There was an interesting discovery – we found that contacting the community partners through email was not an effective way to update information and ask for consent because most of them did not reply. To solve this problem, another round of phone calls were made, and the results were positive. We have confidence that by the upcoming week, we can finish updating the Food Asset Map.

Moment of Significant Change

The workshop this week provided us an opportunity to look back and reflect on our progress. In addition, it provided us insight of how our team dynamic had play out as the term went on. It helped us catch some potential problems that may come up and prevent it to allow for a graceful dismount later.

The first exercise was to graph each member’s knowledge and skills in the time span of this project. It highlighted the fact that although skills and knowledge can be correlated, they are not quite the same. As shown in Graph 1, the knowledge and skills that we acquired are positively correlated. When our knowledge about the project increased, our skills increased too. However, it never surpassed the knowledge base, we acquired since the skills are based off of what we know. At the beginning, we had little knowledge about the project, hence our skills, or how we approached the project was limited, but we became more informed as time went on. With the help from one of our community partner Teya and our TA, we started our project by contacting prospective community partners. We followed the contacting templates provided by Teya which improved our communication skills, signified by the rise in knowledge and rise of lines in graph 1. Due to individual variation and interpretation of knowledge and skill, some of us felt that we learned more than others, and therefore experienced a greater increase in knowledge than others. The fact that the green line experienced a larger increase in knowledge is because she did not have prior experience contacting others in a professional manner, whereas the blue line had some prior experience, minimizing the knowledge gap.

Next, we each graphed a timeline of our emotions and attitude. Graph 2 allowed us to have a mental check in with ourselves and with each other. We learned that even though we were experiencing the same situation and had the same ups and downs as a group, not everyone on the team was affected the same way. While most of us started in the “happy zone”, the fates of each individual vary drastically. For example, the blue line experienced a short increase of positive emotions followed by a steady decline in happiness as time went on. Whereas the red line experienced a rapid increase of positivity followed by a plateau in emotions, then a sharp decrease with an equally fast increase to a happy medium with a plateau. The general trend was that most of us experienced a gain in positive emotions in the beginning as we began to learn more about the project and get comfortable with each other. After that, we all experienced a downfall to some degree. Reasons for the downfall mainly included difficulties contacting community partners, lack of responses from food assets, being overwhelmed by assignments, as well as small things like the rainy days and cold weather.

The main take-away idea from this workshop was that the same physical situation, which in this case is the project, will have different effects on team members. Just because someone is very content with what is happening does not necessarily mean that the next person is happy as well. We should always make an effort as a team to understand each other and try to figure out what may be bothering someone or preventing them from gaining knowledge or skills. Continue doing so will make our group work smoother and prepare us for a graceful dismount.

Graceful Dismount

We have been doing a good job in communicating and sharing responsibilities so far, and it is important for us to keep the effective communication up in order to finish this project.

As mentioned above, we will continue to contact assets by phone if we haven’t heard from them through email, but we will be careful to respect their decisions and not pressure anyone into being part of the map. We will coordinate with our community partner, Old Barn Community Center, to conduct our trial in the next flexible learning session. We will make sure all group members are aware of how to use the map, and verse ourselves in the appropriate way to conduct the trial as specified by Teya.

Most importantly, we will not become discouraged if we don’t get the expected results. We will continue to get as much participation as possible and make sure the project is completed. It will be futile to be discouraged if assets do not wish to participate as this is out of our control. Additionally, while we hope to get as many people trialling the map as possible, we shall keep in mind that this is a voluntary process. Therefore we will make sure not to pressure anyone to participate, and keep our survey and the process ethical.

With respect to our final report, we plan to take into consideration the feedback we have received on our project proposal, as this constitutes a main part of our report. By making the appropriate corrections we can make sure that our final report is informative, sequential, and succinct.

Future weekly objectives

Week 10 (Nov. 7th-10th)

• Continue updating the excel sheet for the Food Asset Map for free or subsidized grocery programs.
• Coordinate logistics of map trialling with Old Barn Community Centre.

Week 11 (Nov. 14th-18th)

• Collect qualitative data in tabular form (Excel).
• Generate infographics based on our data presented.
• Start surveying process for the Vancouver Asset Map.
• Analyze data obtained and present data to our Community Partner (Teya Stephens).

Week 12 (Nov. 21st-25th)

• Prepare slides for the final presentation
• Begin writing the final report.

Week 13 (Nov. 28th-Dec. 2nd)

• Present our project, Free & Subsidized Grocery Items, to the UBC community (Nov. 30th)
• Finish writing the final group report.