Weekly Achievement and Objectives
In order to successfully complete our project, we developed a schedule pointing out tasks that we achieve every week.
In the previous weeks, we first discussed what interested us and decided to choose food accessibility as main aspect that we measure to evaluate community kitchens. We are going to investigate the infrastructure of community kitchens in Dunbar as our goal throughout the whole project to understand how food can be accessed by the community from these kitchens. To ensure that all of us contribute to the group project, we also created a google doc and set up due dates for each member’s contribution. Right after we finished our first blog posting, we began preparing our project proposal, finalizing the aims and objectives of our project. Additionally, we continued our search in the Dunbar neighborhood for community kitchens, and contacted them through email. So far we have already communicated with one of the kitchens, and we are looking forward to working with them.
Our objectives for this week are to visit the community kitchens which replied us and to continue contacting other community kitchens by phone. To ensure that our visit are successful, we will prepare the consent form and survey in advance. We will also contact each other before the visiting day to ensure the whole team is prepared.
Moments of Significance – So Far
In the recent weeks, our team has been working on our proposal revising it three times in total. On the first draft, we directly used the project vision of Vancouver Food Strategy as our aim, which was a wrong decision since the project vision was unrealistic for us to achieve. For the second draft, we brainstormed over 9 inquiry questions, regarding to the common interests about the community kitchens we all had. One question that we all favored was to find out the nutritional value (e.g. fat contents) of food in Dunbar’s community kitchens. However, all these 9 inquiry questions, including our favorite one, were rejected after discussing with our teaching assistant thoroughly. The major issue of our inquiry questions was that they could not be measured or analyzed through the survey provided by the LFS teaching team. We felt frustrated and overwhelmed on how we should narrow down our aims and objectives. On the third draft, we examined the given survey and clarified our aim with multiple trials. Finally our proposal received approval from our teaching assistant.
This is a reflection of how frustrations and failures can help us identify our mistakes; eventually, it redirects us to a satisfied answer. On Freakonomics Radio podcast “Failure is your friend”(2015), Steve Levitt said that the quicker you fail, the more opportunities you can find the things you don’t fail at. Indeed, failures usually occur because we interpreted or explored a question in a wrong way. Failures act as a sign to warn us that we should take another path to reach our aim. In Tim Harvard’s Ted Talk(2015), he presented that obstacles, slow people down, force people to work harder, think more, and therefore learn more. Failures enable us to have a better understanding of our project. In light of the unexpected advantages of failures, we should accept failures and learn from it. In the following weeks, we will encounter more challenges while reaching out for potential community partners. For example, we may not get responses after we email potential organizations. By accepting failures as valuable experiences, we are more likely to achieve our aim of this project.
Upcoming Objectives
For this week, our group will be aiming to contact at least four community partners. We have visited the Dunbar neighborhood in search for potential partners. In the next few days we will continue to email and call organizations and ask if they are interested in participating in our research study. As our final project proposal has been approved by our instructors, we aim to visit at least one community kitchen this week and start collecting the information we need from them. We look forward to officially starting our project, and getting in contact with all the community kitchens.
Download Link to our project proposal:
Reference
1.Harford,T.(2015,september). How frustration can make us more creative. Ted Talk retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/tim_harford_how_messy_problems_can_inspire_creativity/transcript?language=en#t-374880
2.Freakonomics. (2015, May 20).Failure is Your Friend. Retrieved from http://freakonomics.com/podcast/failure-is-your-friend-a-freakonomics-radio-rebroadcast/