Weekly Achievement and objectives
This week our main objective is to continue to contact and hopefully work with as many community partners as we can. As of now we have successfully communicated with two community partners, however only one of them were suitable and willing to share with us, their kitchen activities and programs. We realize that only having a complete set of data from one kitchen is not sufficient, therefore this week we hope to conduct interviews with at least two or more community partners.
Our achievements so far is definitely the amount of experience we gained from contacting to actually interviewing our partners. Whether we contact organizations through email, phone, or physically visiting them, our group has grown as a whole from being shy at first to being able to converse with people in a more professional way. As a team, we have been able to share our workload more efficiently, and learned to accommodate to each other’s and our community partner’s time schedules or other complications. Although the completion is definitely not an easy task, however we are learning more as we approach the end, and that is what we believe is the most valuable accomplishment.
Moment of Significance -So far
In this week’s tutorial, we had a chance to reflect our perspectives towards the project, and draw the diagram of moment of significant change. This diagram actually surprised us that we responded similarly to the events we encountered. At first, we all felt disappointed to the project that assigned to us since it was not our preferred choices. Along with more understanding and exploration on this project, we felt more positive.We reached the peak of our energy level when we successful visited one small community kitchen. However, two weeks later, our energy level dropped to the valley as we were rejected by several organizations, including the one we had already visited. These kitchens mainly rejected us for three reasons. Firstly,they do not have typical food aid programs that assist low-income population, which meets the expectation of “community kitchen.” Secondly, they consider Dunbar as a relatively well-developed and wealthy region;therefore, there is little demand for community kitchen. Thirdly,our research is not applicable or beneficial to their kitchen facilities, which is not a main focus of their business. So far, this is not only the most frustrating point for us, but also a moment lead to a scope change of our definition of “community kitchen”.
Generally, we may picture an image of soup kitchen for homeless when we see the phrase “community kitchen”. However, it should include more insightful meaning. It should be a place where people can celebrate and bond with food and their community no matter how their socioeconomic backgrounds differ. This moment of significance remind us the importance of flexibility. We have to be flexible to make adjustments for the identified obstacles. In the podcast This American Life: Poetry Slam 2011 Latin Liver, Eduardo introduced a natural way to produce Foie Gras instead of the conventional force-fed methods. The secret to natural production of Foie Gras is that goose is convinced to be wild. From the inspiration of Eduardo, Dan tried to bring this method to New York. He completely failed to reproduce this method since the environmental condition is different from where Eduardo raised the goose. He kept trying and made changes every year, so he might find a satisfied answer in the near future. From the encouragement of this podcast, we will make adjustments to the further progression of our project.
Upcoming Strategies
We became more confident when we clearly understood that “community kitchen” could be defined as kitchen within community”, rather than “the place that provide free meal for low income groups”. The misunderstanding of “community kitchen” led to the rejection of community partners since they consider their kitchens as unqualified. That was the rooted reason why we could not successfully get any community partners when we walked in those churches on Sundays.
We will continue to contact more organizations in the Dunbar area, and we will use the term ‘kitchens in the community’ to redefine our objectives and goals Also, we will try to re-contact the churches that we visited and modify our speech to them in order to get one more chance for cooperating.
We would also take good advantage of the flexible learning day on the coming Monday, March 14, to bring all the group members together and work on the project. We will discuss about the part of data analysis after we collect all the data from community partners. Moreover, we will assign each member of the group with a specific part of our group project so that we could share all the work and complete our project on time. Ultimately, we hope to gather positive and constructive insights from the interviews within the community.
Reference
The American Life. (2011, Dec 2). Poetry Slam 2011 Latin Liver. Retrieved from http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/452/poultry-slam-2011?act=3#play