Blog Post 3: Strategies for a Graceful Dismount
Weekly Objectives & Achievements
Week 7 (Reading week):
Objectives:
- Keep up to date with group members and the progression of the project
Achievements:
- Maintained contact within group through Facebook chat
Week 8:
Objectives:
- Start Blog Post 3
- Contact our list of community kitchens by email
Achievements:
- An outline for Blog Post 3 was made
- A drafted email was sent out to community kitchens
Week 9:
Objectives:
- Update Blog Post 3
- Contact our list of community kitchens by phone if there is no response via email
- Start setting up prospective visit dates
Achievements:
- Blog Post 3 was updated
- Received one email response that indicates no interest in participating in the survey. Further effort to communicate received no follow-up.
- We then called 6 prospective kitchens and left 2 voice mails, received confirmation from 4 other places that they do not run community kitchen.
Week 10:
Objectives:
- Update and finalize Blog Post 3
- Shift our focus from community kitchens to kitchens that run food programs in the Kitsilano/West Point Grey neighborhoods
- Visit prospective kitchens in person to conduct the assessment surveys
Achievements:
- Due to a lack of response from community kitchens, we have organized specific group members to visit kitchens in person
- Half of the group visited West Point Grey United Church and received good feedback with filled-out survey and sufficient pictures of their kitchen.
- Similarly, the other half successfully conducted interviews with kitchen managers at Kitsilano Community Center and Kitsilano Neighborhood House. To our pleasant surprise, the Russian Community Center also has a functional kitchen and food programs. We managed to get the contact information of the kitchen’s managers and will be contacting them as soon as possible.
This week, our group learned to truly apply the asset-based community development theory (ABCD) to real-life situations. Due to a lack of responses from community kitchens, we were disappointed and focused on the shortcomings of the kitchens such as lack of staff to reply, lack of availability, etc. After some reflection, we remembered to look at the resources already available and present such as the fact that there are community kitchens even present in the communities.
Moment of Significant Change
As a group, we did a moments of significant change activity where we would graph our personal moments of significant change as the course progressed starting from the beginning of the term. This storied approach allowed us to reflect and on such changes and think about why they were significant to us. Then, as a group, we combined our individual graphs into a large overarching graph. The blue line depicts the average for group members while the other colors (pink, red and orange) represent outliers from individual opinions. In general, our group was optimistic about the project in the beginning but this positivity began to fall when we were working on the proposal. As the reading break came around, people’s spirits improved and motivation increased. However, when we started facing difficulty reaching out to community kitchens, the our positivity and excitement decreased drastically. The trend was exacerbated as the midterm season came around and as we rushed to complete the Academic and Experiential Review Paper. The tutorial class where we were able to discuss some of the problems we were facing gave us renewed hope and motivation as shown in the graph. At the end of the graph, the dotted lines are our projected outcomes in the hopes to achieve, to a great extent, our initial objectives for the final assignments.
What?
Receiving permission to conduct our research in community kitchens is unexpectedly challenging. We emailed five different community kitchens, among which, only one responded. Their response was rather conclusive and did not indicate any interest in participating in our survey. After one week of no answer and follow-up, we called all prospective community kitchens, including one that we did not email due to lack of contact information in hopes of better outcomes. However, we ended up with voicemail messages at two of the kitchens and information from the other four that they do not offer any community kitchens program.
So what?
We made an assumption that most community kitchens would be cooperative as long as we show clear objectives and respectfulness in our emails. However, this was clearly not the case. Due to the lack of participation from community kitchens, some members of the group lost motivation due to our initially high expectation. This moment made us realize the high probability that we might not be able to achieve our aims and objectives for this project. It taught us that things will not always work out as we expect and we need to be prepared for such occurrences in the future as well. Knowing that our deadline is drawing near and not hearing back from kitchens did definitely induce some anxiety among the team members. This gives our group even more reason to work together and towards our goal.
The fact that our expectations changed reflects the ABCD theory in action. Rather than focusing on what was available, we focused on what was out of our reach. This reminds us of what Will mentioned in class where kitchens were reluctant to participate because students were focusing on what was lacking and not building on what was already available.
Now what?
The lack of responses from the community kitchens drives us as a group to work harder to reach our goal. As a result of this lack of feedback from the community kitchen, we should be more proactive and adopt other more methods of communication to reach the parties. One way would be to visit them in person and kindly ask them for permission to conduct the survey or get a community center to connect us to one. From here, we could also apply snowball sampling to reach the greater numbers. In addition, we could expand our area of focus and include nearby neighbourhoods such as Dunbar. Our goal will be to reach approximately six community kitchens.
Linking to the asset-based community development theory, we decided not to focus too much on the lack of responses but rather the resources already available in the kitchens. The fact that there was a community kitchen in place was already something to start with. They had contact information we could contact and some programs in place. With that, we were able to get to work and find kitchens to visit.
In the middle of the week, we proceeded with walk-in visits to a few kitchens around the Point Grey area. We were very fortunate to have encountered almost no obstacles while visiting, as we were given permission to do a full interview and observation at the West Point Grey United Church. The visit left a good impression on both us and the community partner, hence, it boosted our confidence and motivation in reaching other community kitchens. We also visited the Brock House Society in Jericho. Though we have not yet conducted the survey, as it took a while for us to figure out who would be the best to answer our survey question, we found out that the kitchen is shared between two stakeholders, the Brock House Society, and Brock House Restaurant. The former requires the kitchen to hold a regular lunch program for the elderly while the latter uses the kitchen commercially. We will attempt to contact the individual to runs the lunch program, as we feel we this would be more applicable to our assessment work. Two others stated that they do not have offer any community kitchens programs, which is used commercially. Since the kitchen is run by two groups, as evaluators, this presents a challenge in our analysis, but also adds an interesting perspective given the multiple uses of one facility.
Strategy for Successful Project Completion
- Continue to find and contact community kitchens in various ways; calling kithcens and visiting in person if we do not hear back from them
- Maintain communication within our group through Facebook chat to keep each member updated on our individual tasks and progress; to organize and assign further tasks
- Organize data from surveys using excel spreadsheet for effective data analysis which will be discussed in our report
- Meet as a group in person to work on final report and final presentation; discuss ideas and questions; practice and rehearse our presentation
This was a great week that allowed us to apply what we learned in class to real-life situations and our project. The asset-based community development theory was made more real to us and we saw the importance and significance of it.
Sources:
- Mathie, A., & Cunningham, G. (2003). From clients to citizens: Asset-based Community Development as a strategy for community-driven development. Development in Practice, 13(5), 474–486.