Ever wondered where your food came from?
We are localEd., a group of UBC Land and Food Systems undergraduate students trying to make answering that question a lot easier for you all! Learn more about our team here!
We are all very passionate about eating and cooking great food and we are excited to share this passion with our fellow Vancouverites. We believe it’s important for our future generations to be knowledgeable about all the delicious and nutritious food Vancouver has to offer, which is why we are trying to engage students into discovering their community food system.
Throughout this experience, we are looking to gain a better understanding of opportunities the Vancouver School Board has to offer in terms of local food integration. More importantly, we are aiming to establish valuable connections with community members who can provide insight on potential barriers with our project.
The ultimate goal of our initiative is to create a plausible framework for local food knowledge integration into the Vancouver School Board. We hope that our findings will inspire community members to take interest – potentially leading to a wave of interest that will spread throughout the school board.
Ernesto Sirolli’s TED Talk focused on the importance of listening to an entrepreneur’s needs and goals to best achieve success with aid. We consider the City of Vancouver an entrepreneur in itself, and thus the priority actions listed on their Food Strategy website was vital in determining the course of our project. In addition to our love for food, localEd. is also interested in the education system. We tried to combine the needs of the community partner with aspects of the food system we are very dedicated to.
localEd. is determined to create a project that continuously draws on the principles of Asset Based Community Development. We will begin by looking into the strengths of multiple components involved in our project: the Vancouver School Board, the local food system, and the City of Vancouver. We will eventually address the distribution of power with local food initiatives in the school system. In order for power to be relocated to communities, there needs to be less direct involvement from outside sources. Our focus on education speaks to this issue by giving the power of knowledge directly to the students themselves. The community partners have valuable experiences that we believe will be the greatest asset to this project.
