Executive Summary
The aim of our project is to evaluate and analyze community kitchens in Dunbar area of Vancouver through the lens of food accessibility. The importance of our project is that it can assist the City of Vancouver to understand how community kitchens prepare and serve food to residents increasing food accessibility for community members. Our main objective is to investigate the infrastructures of community kitchens and what programs and/or activities does the community kitchens provide. We searched for potential community partners through the internet, and physically exploring the neighborhood. After gathering the contact information of a few churches in the are, we first contact them through email, briefly stating the purpose of our study, and asking if they would like to participate in our research. After a few weeks, our group was finally granted permission to visit one church in the Dunbar neighborhood. During our visit we conducted a brief interview, asking questions based off of a survey which was provided by our instructors. The survey consisted of questions regarding the type of facilities, equipments, accessibility of the kitchen, and kitchen management.
From the data we have collected, we concluded majority of the kitchens in the Dunbar area are “domestic” and found in religious facilities. In addition, many of the churches do not host their own programs, instead they allow external community-based organizations rent their kitchen space for events. According to the results of our study, churches in the Dunbar community welcome community-based programs with open arms, and we recommend the encouragement of kitchen usage in such religious facilities. Although their kitchen space is domestically built, there is plenty of room for small community projects, such as, small cooking classes or small social gatherings.
A moment of significance
Throughout the course of our project challenges did arise where our high expectations could not be fulfilled. We encountered various kind of rejections or ignoring when we tried to reach out for community partners. Some might change their willingness to participate in our research even though they promised earlier. Some responded to us with a never-reply-back cell phone/email appointments. With all these rejections and obstacles, we had to unwillingly admit that our project did not lead to a result that we hoped to see. We could not visit and collect data from at least 4 kitchen facilities in the Dunbar community; instead, we could only analyze one data obtained from our kind community partner-St Philip’s Anglican Church. At the end of this project, we were struggled with how we should analyze our data since we have only a single set of data, which was not enough to be representative of the whole Dunbar Area. As inspired by the LFS teaching team, we noticed that we could compare our data with all the data obtained by other groups, which may indirectly reflect how our region was significantly different.
In light of this experience, we noticed that, by taking a different angle to look at this whole process, there would be a lot of valuable information gained from our experiences.By taking a different angle at all the rejections, we could notice that community partners are not interested in participating in this research either due to our ineffective communication or their unwillingness. As described by earlier posting, the wordings of “community kitchen” lead to misunderstandings of community partners. They think we only take food aid program into consideration. However, this indirectly shows that food aid program is not common in Dunbar.
Also, through this process, we gained lots of unexpected happiness. The pony farm we visited is a hidden wonder in the neighborhood. Even thought it was not accounted as a community kitchen that related to our project, we were happy to see the ponies are under good care and spacious barn compared to the industrial dairy farm we saw from LFS 250 field trip. During the visit to St Philip’s Anglican Church, one of our group member met her high school teacher. She kindly showed us around the church and told us what food donations are suitable for the homeless people.
So far, we have gained more understand the approach of Assets based community development compared to the first blog posting. When working through the data we collected, we found that the ABCD (asset-based community development) lens are useful for future improvement of the community kitchen that we visited. Refering back to the definition of ABCD, it is an approach that focuses on community assests and strength, which means that it helps communities by strengthing what communities asset. We will still have develop a report to state our main findings and to clear our reflections on this project.
The community kitchen project was a good community based project for us to obtain an opportunity to collaborate with community skateholders to engage in the improvement of community kitchens. The project provided us a chance to developing our researching skills and communication skills which are helpful in our future career. We learned how to cooperate with group mates and learned how to keep positive attitude in the unexpected moment.
Lastly, we hope you enjoy reading all our blogs, thank you!