Category Archives: Food security

Week 11: The Finale

Food accessibility, Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350

During the last week of November, my team has been hard at work in finalizing the tasks associated with our project outcomes. The FAQ and scientific component for addition to the manual has been revised and would be ready to send off to our community partner along with our final report.  The final report is close to being completed; we have yet to proofread and fine-tune specific sections, such as the discussion, before it is ready for submission. Furthermore, we have been fulfilling the expectations of our blog webpage. My team found it difficult to upload pictures and other media of our CBEL experiences online due to the nature of our project (mostly literature review) and not having the opportunity to carry out and capture our community service learning.  Listening to other LFS 350 group’s plenary presentations during the previous week was helpful in assembling and delivering the final presentation. It has helped to highlight aspects that we should have considered while designing and carrying out our project as well as to suggest further community engagement activities for future groups continuing our work.  We also had the pleasure of Shona and Darlene from Fresh Choice Kitchens joining our class for our final CBEL presentation.  We appreciate that they were able to take the time to witness the product of our combined efforts over the course of three months. We are extremely grateful to Shona, Diane and Darlene for their time, resources, patience and feedback we received in making this project a success!

Final Presentation

After combining the interview responses with the results from our literature review into our discussion, we can conclude that food literacy does play a role in contributing to greater food security through empowering individuals in the community to improve their health by seeking greater resilience and social adversity. This is agreed by most of the interviewees who cited that home canning motivates others to preserve backyard grown fruits and vegetables, learn food preservation techniques and have a greater consciousness with regards to food consumption. Our literature review has also provided support for our findings with a notable article by Andress et al. (2011), who noted household’s increasing interest in long-term home preservation during times of food insecurity and the emergence of NCHFPP, a website that offered canning techniques and a self-study canning course that was created in response to the demand. Many of the registers cited food culture, food safety, home gardening, health & nutrition and economic self-sufficiency as motivators for participating in the online canning course; hence this implies the public’s interest to maintain food security through increasing food literacy (Andress et al., 2011). A significant aspect that emerged during our research and interviews is the importance of considering the cultural appropriateness of the canning workshops for the community. Incorporating culturally appropriate recipes is essential as it increases the application of techniques learned at home, which thereby promotes food security. Our team also drew up a list of recommendations that may be beneficial for similar projects with Fresh Choices Kitchens in the future. Some of the recommendations include developing different versions of the canning manual with different languages and corresponding cultural foods and uploading an electronic version of the FAQs and tutorial videos online. Future LFS 350 should organize a focus group, preferably with canning workshop participants, instead of individual interviews in order to gather more detailed responses and save time.

Each member of my team had a rewarding CBEL experience. Some of us reflected on learning to listen to the feedback and what the community needs rather than what you think they need, which in hindsight, could have reduced the number of miscommunications and problems when developing our research question.  Some found the interviews a very insightful experience as listening to the community facilitators opens up further possibilities of community engagement.  Others appreciated the opportunity to build social relationships with group members and the community through flexible learning.  Despite having to overcome the hurdles, our team learned quite a lot from our project, community partner and each other; we truly enjoyed our CBEL experience and would not have traded it for another project!

Yummy canned goods from Fresh Choice Kitchens -> all gone!

Week 10: Interview Results + Reflections

Food accessibility, Food marketing, Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350

At last, our group has completed the final round of Skype interviews. The constructive feedback from the canning trainers and environmental health officers (EHO) have been taken into consideration as our group continues to improve the FAQ and the scientific component of the manual. We hope to ultimately develop a product with sufficient details, but is also clear, concise and understandable for the canning trainers.  For the final report, we have been conducting our literature review to support our analysis in the discussion. Most studies agree that the knowledge of home preservation or food literacy increases food security by reducing consumer spending, learning to prepare healthy meals from all food groups and practicing food safety. After compiling the interview responses, we found that all interviewees agree that educating people on home food preservation will improve their food literacy in terms of increasing their knowledge on food safety, nutritional aspects of canning ingredients and seasonality of fruits. On the other hand, most interviewees express that there is not a definite answer to the question regarding whether education on home food preservation contributes to improved food security. The fact whether people may actually apply food preservation techniques at home depends on a variety of factors, such as their economic status, access to equipment, time availability and residence. Currently, we are still reviewing the interview responses to further analyze the various factors, which may affect the likelihood of people preserving food at home.

During the week, we have discussed the layout and key points that we will be addressing for the plenary presentation. Since only three minutes are allocated for each group, it is impossible for every member to offer his or her contribution. Hence, both Nathan and Drew have volunteered to speak on our group’s behalf.  We also believe that it would only be fair if the other members assist the presenters by posting their results, interpretations and personal reflections online. Having devoted over two months of effort on this project, we are looking forward to showcasing our results to other LFS 350 groups on Wednesday!

Taken from McGill Publications

Much to our dismay, our group was unable to plan a second site visit to GVFBS last week due to conflicts in scheduling. We would have toured their warehouse and noted down the trends in the type of charitable foods donated over the years. Moreover, it would have been a great volunteer opportunity if we could participate and assist trainers with their canning workshops. It will have enabled us to better meet the needs of our community partner and the canning trainers by identifying which sections of the manual requires further explanation. Nevertheless, our interviews with the canning trainers may be considered as an indirect form of community engagement. We are not only including the voices from our group, but also from the canning trainers, EHOs and canning workshop participants (through the trainers’ feedback) when answering our research questions regarding food literacy and food security. Through this dialogue, my group can gain a better understanding of the barriers that food insecure individuals are facing in the community and the reasons that participants would choose to attend the canning workshops. Given that food literacy does increase food security, we hope that our findings and recommendations from this research project may assist our community partner and/or future groups to further address the issue of food security through home food preservation.

For the following week, we aim to complete our designated parts for the draft report by Sunday. The main points from our report will be used to formulate our final presentation. We will then meet on Monday to discuss and put together the powerpoint presentation.

One more week to go!

Week 9: Only 3 weeks left!

Food accessibility, Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350

Before we know it, there are only 3 weeks left until the end of the term! At this time, our group is shifting our focus from the canning manual to our final paper.

As mentioned in the last blog, our group had originally planned to conduct the phone call interviews at the Food Bank last Wednesday, Nov. 6th. However, since only two of the interviewees confirmed by Wednesday morning that they would be free to do the interview in the afternoon, we finally decided to stay on campus to conduct our interviews through Skype call.  Later, two more participants confirmed that they were available for the interviews. As the interviewees are from not only Vancouver, but also further regions such as Vernon and as far as Toronto, Jasmine created a Skype account specially for our interview and kindly paid for it in advance.

After revising the interview questions with our community partner, we decided to ask 2 questions regarding the usability of the FAQ section which we added to the canning manual (part I), and 2 other questions related to our research question (part II). As the participants of our interviews include both canning trainers and environmental health officers (EHO), we made two different versions of the questions for part I:

Canning manual hard copy provided by FCK

 For canning trainers:
1.    After reading through the FAQ, would you be able to answer these questions yourself if they were asked by your canning students?
2.    Were there any FAQs that you did not understand?  If yes, how could it be made more clear?

For EHOs:
1.    Is the information provided in the FAQs accurate?
2.    How could the information in the FAQs be made more clear?  (if they ask for this question to be explained, ask if these answers would be understandable to the general public or ask what grade level they see this info as geared towards?)

 For part II:
3.    In your opinion, do you think educating people on home preservation contributes to a person’s food literacy?
4.    In your opinion, how does educating people on home preservation improve a person’s food security?  Does it improve their health?

We had originally planned to interview 4 of the participants on Wednesday afternoon. The first interview with a EHO went well and he provided us a lot of valuable advice on how to improve the FAQs, as well as his opinions on the questions related to our research project. Unfortunately, we could not reach the second interviewee at the scheduled time, and the last two interviewees had not finished going over the manual and we had to reschedule the calls to other dates with them. In the end, after spending more than 3 hours meeting together to conduct the interviews, we were only able to interview one person successfully. Nevertheless, in between the scheduled calls, our group managed the time wisely to discuss different aspects of the project, including dividing up the remaining  interviews between the members, clearly defining designated parts of the final report and reconfirming our internal deadlines.

We were able to conduct five more interviews during the week. However, there are still some participants who were not available last week, thus we will need to continue, and hopefully finish, the remaining interviews by the end of this week. Fortunately, from the interviewed participants, we were able to gain many helpful suggestions about the FAQs of the canning manual. Most of them state that some terms used in the FAQs may still be too professional for the general audience to understand, and some of the answers may be excessively detailed – more than the general public will be interested to know. Therefore we have immediately started revising our FAQs accordingly. Participants also gave valuable opinions on our research question which, as mentioned in the previous blog post,  relates food preservation methods with food literacy and food security.

Much to our surprise, there were also many unexpected changes to the interviewing schedules. We originally expected that all interviews would have been completed last week,  thus currently we seem slightly behind our proposed schedule.  Nevertheless, in the mean time all members have begun working on their designated parts of the final paper. We will also continue the literature review on our research question and investigate how past studies may relate to the data collected from the interviews.  By the end of this week, our group expects that all interviews will be completed and that a draft paper will be formulated so that we could prepare for the plenary presentation next Wednesday.

Thanks for reading our updates! See you again next week!

Week 7 & 8: Troubleshooting + Interviews

Food accessibility, Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350

With October coming to an end, our group has been focused on completing the scientific component for the canning manual.  While reviewing the existing manual, we were surprised to find that most topics had already been covered in great detail, despite being written at a grade six level.  Thus, instead of introducing a new section, we believe that it would be more useful to provide the trainers and/or their trainees with a 2 to 3 paged summary, highlighting the major topics and expanding on the details with scientific principles. This summary is nearly complete and would be sent off before the interviews with the trainers.  Meanwhile, we have finalized the one-on-one interview times with the Fresh Choice Kitchen’s canning trainers. We are looking forward to speaking with the trainers in hopes of addressing the usability of the manual and answering our finalized research questions, which are:

“To what extent does educating people on home preservation contribute to a person’s food literacy (in the aspects of understanding how and where the food is produced)? How would this result in improving food security with regards to personal health?”

We have received plenty of constructive feedback from our community partner on the FAQ and our list of interview questions for the trainers.  While every group member could attest to our efforts in conducting extensive research Agreementand generating appropriate responses for the FAQ, we appreciate their feedback and agree there is opportunity for further improvement.  Due to the familiarity and frequent usage of the scholarly language on campus, we acknowledge that it was fairly difficult for us to determine whether the language was at the grade six level. Hence, it is interesting to see which sections we thought were understandable, but were in fact deemed relatively complex for our selected audience. On the other hand, our group was quite disappointed by their response regarding the interview questions. After directly discussing with our community partner, we understand that there was simply a miscommunication between both parties, which was resolved upon direct communication over the phone. Considering the importance of community consultation as emphasized by this week’s e-lecture by Ernesto Sirolli, my group is extremely grateful to Drew for offering to call and resolve the misunderstandings with Fresh Choice Kitchens.  At the end the conversation, we are happy to report that everyone is on the same page.  Our initial interview questions were replaced with a set of new interview questions that were created together with our community partner. There will be two questions dedicated to the usability of the manual and two for our research question.

Since the trainers are from different regions of BC, instead of a focus group discussion (which we have previously planned), we are going to interview the trainers individually via telephone. This will slightly be more time-consuming for us, but  it is beneficial in a way that the participants will not be affected by opinions of others, therefore eliminating the bias effect that a focus group might cause on the participants.

Teamwork and agreement

For the remainder of the week, our group will be making our second site visit at the GVFBS, where we will be conducting the one-on-one interviews with the canning trainers on Wednesday and wrap up on Thursday using Skype. The FAQ revision will also be done at that time with our community partner.  Throughout the next two weeks, we will be working on the final report and continue to review scientific journals. Once we have compiled the responses from the interviews, we can incorporate the findings to our final report.  Despite the approaching deadlines, we—as a team—are confident in overcoming any more challenges that may come our way!

Week 6: The research must go on!

Food Processing, Food security, Sustainable food resources

In the past week, our group has been discussing extensively on the revised research question. We are almost there and we hope that it will suit the requests of our community partner. We consider our most recent community visit our conference call last week. It is disappointing that we had to change our research question, but in the meantime we are putting the greatest effort in formulating a research question that not only satisfies our community partner’s expectations, but at the same time does not diminish our group’s academic interest. We have divided the FAQ portion of the manual among our group members and we have been hard at work reviewing articles of literature reviews. The FAQs for the manual are generally completed and now we are moving on to the science portion of the manual. Some of the hot topics our community partner was concerned with are the scientific background behind Clostridium botulinum and their strains, or the role of pectin in producing jam. We also explored additional methods of canning and assessed their safety and practical uses. Some of the interesting information we came across included:

-Lower temperature pasteurization of pickles (160°F for 36 minutes as opposed to 212°F)

– Pectin binding to water to only provide food structure in jams and jellies. They are not a factor in inhibiting microbial growth

-Sugar is not the sole factor in eliminating the risk of pathogen growth and inactivating enzymes in low acid foods; they are used for flavouring and colour.

-A very miniscule amount of botulinum toxin is enough to cause full body paralysis

-The botulinum bacteria are rod shaped organisms that are slightly bent and thrive in low acid, wet, and anaerobic environments

Our plans for the remainder of the week is to commence our in-depth research on the scientific background to ensuring the safety and viability of the canning process. We will then need to divide up each of the chapters of the manual. Once that is complete, we will then need to compile that and do an extensive edit to make sure that our new information well supplements the manual. Also, we need to ensure the language is at approximately a grade six level. As mentioned in the previous blog post, we have just had a conference call with our community partner. Our tentative research question is To what extent does educating people on how to can at home contribute to a person’s food literacy, resulting in improved food security with regards to personal health? Our focus group meeting is scheduled for the beginning of November and we need to have this done as soon as possible. Thanks for tuning in, and we will blog about our next experience.

 

Week 5: Research Proposal

Food and culture, Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350

Welcome to our 5th blog post!

Last week we received feedbacks of our written proposal and we got a satisfactory grade, which is encouraging since we had put a lot of effort into it. The feedbacks from Bryanna are very helpful. Here is a brief explanation of our research proposal: our original research question was how the Food Choice Kitchens canning workshops contribute to the improvement of food security in the aspects of food affordability and food safety in the Strathcona community? Today our group had a teleconference with our community contacts Diane and Shona to talk about and clarify our research proposal. However, after our talk with our community partner, we decide to modify our research question since the Fresh Choice Kitchens does not work directly with the general public; instead, they work with trainers who would deliver canning workshops to the general public over the British Columbia. Our new research question would be focusing on the need of “training the trainer” and how it relates to food literacy. Since we just had the conversation later this afternoon, we still need time to work on the research question as a group. Our research method will include literature review and discussions with a focus group. The method of literature review will produce reliable scientific information on canning processes for the canning manual. Second research method is conducting focus group interviews with trainers and possibly environmental health officers organized by our community partner to ensure the clarity and understandability of the added sections of the canning manual. So we could make adjustments to the new section based on their responses. By the end of this project, we hope to produce user-friendly material about the safety and science of canning that provides necessary safe home-canning information to the trainers of the canning workshops and increases the awareness of food literacy. Our research action plan is clearly stated in our written proposal, specific to completion date and work distribution. As Bryanna recommended, we would make our plenary presentation interesting and creative.

For the coming week: our group members are working efficiently on the frequently asked questions provided by our community partner by conducting background literature research, hopefully we would be able to complete the section by this Wednesday and start working on the new chapter of the canning manual. For our added section of the canning manual, we decide to focus on the science behind first two chapters of the original manual as suggested by our community partner and make sure the scientific information is clearly explained. Meanwhile, our group will also be putting effort on formulating our final research question and designing potential focus group questions. Today our group briefly talked about potential focus group questions including: 1) Did the trainers think the workshop and the manual is useful? Did the additional information on the manual increase their knowledge on food safety? 2) Which part of BC are the trainers from? Where will they hold their workshops? 3) Will the trainees from their workshops be able to apply the knowledge they gained from the workshop at home, i.e. do they can at home after attending the workshop? What do the trainers expect the trainees to take out from the workshops? 4) How many workshops do the trainers usually hold throughout the year? What is the average size of the workshop? What are the most popular workshops? 5) Why do the trainers hold these workshops? Why do the trainees attend the workshops? 6) What are the usual sources of the foods to be canned?  Are they from supermarkets, local farms, by donation, or self-grown? We will meet again on next Tuesday to talk about our project and keep each other updated. See you all next week!

Week 4: Proposal Presentation and Review

Food accessibility, Food and culture, Food Processing, Food security

This past week our group mainly focused on putting together both our proposal presentation and written proposal. We got answers to quite a few questions with regards to the proposal, with the most important one being clarification of what exactly our research question was going to be and what was expected. In the end, as a group we decided that in addition to updating the canning manual as requested by the GVFBS that we were also going to research about whether being taught how to can food would actually have any overall impact on a person’s food security with a focus on affordability. It became clear through group discussions that although teaching people how to properly and safely can at home is half the battle, having access to the required equipment for low-income individuals is just as important, if not more important. We felt that it was essential to look further into the effect canning would have on individual food security to get a richer understanding of food education/literacy and its relation to food security. As a result of this research question, we decided that while conducting a focus group on the usability of the additional FAQ and science sections of the canning manual, that we were also going to ask some questions about food security and its relation to people’s canning knowledge. One possible solution to this barrier that was proposed by our group was having sets of canning equipment at the GVFBS food depots that people could borrow when needed, as you only need access to canning supplies for short periods of time.

After reading last week’s assigned reading, Enhancing food security through experiential sustainability leadership practices: A study of the Seed to Supper program by D. Withers and H. Burns, the power of experiential learning to conduct positive change through physically engaging individuals on a mutual task was clearly illustrated. It quickly became apparent that the experiential learning that occurs at the GVFBS “train-the-trainer” canning workshops is essentially no different than what was highlighted in the Seed to Supper program. Both programs increase people’s food literacy and empower individuals with the ability to take food security into their own hands. With this in mind, the importance of producing high-quality material for the canning manual was considerably reinforced.

For the upcoming week, our main focus is going to be on conducting a detailed literature review to produce answers for the FAQ section of the canning manual. The FAQ that the GVFBS requested answered were equally split up amongst the group and are to be finished by next week. After our proposal presentation and having greater clarity on our research question, we became very aware that we were going to have to finish our updates to the canning manual relatively quickly so that we are able to conduct a focus group sooner than later. As we are going to require adequate time to work on answering the second part of our research question about canning knowledge and its relation to improving food security.

 

Week 3: Progress Report + Project Planning

Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350, Sustainable food resources

 

       Welcome to our 3rd blog posting! How time flies! Last week we had a 3-hour group meeting to distribute the responsibilities among group members regarding the written proposal and the proposal presentation for our project.  Amy Huang, Drew Bondar and Sophie Dong were assigned to work on the introduction, focusing on introducing our group members, our project, and our community partner. Bonnie Chan and Joyce Liao were assigned to come up with a brief rationale for our research question and to relate it to a broader picture. Jasmine Lee and Nathan Lee were responsible for the selection of methods to conduct this research and explain why these specific research methods were selected. A work plan was created during the meeting to ensure that the entire group is able to complete the tasks before the due dates and to keep up with the progress of our project. Even though every group member has his/her own responsibilities, we will still help each other to solve the problems encountered while conducting the project.  This week, we also received great news from Shona from GVFBS asking whether we as a group would be interested in participating a canning workshop with them to better understand the process of canning.

     As the proposal presentation and the written proposal are due this week, our group will focus on these two tasks at the beginning of this week. We will draft our proposal presentation and meetup to practice on Tuesday and Wednesday. Also, we are going to complete our written proposal two days before the deadline, so we would have time to proofread it. At the same time, our group will send our tentative timeline to our community partner (GVFBS) once our proposal is finalized. We are now in the process of conducting literature reviews for the FAQs regarding the science behind canning and how to perform safe canning. Academic literature research about FAQs is going to be completed by the due date of our draft (Nov. 5) since we plan to finish the FAQs section in the next two weeks and then begin research and revision of the manual. The valuable information obtained from the canning session will also be used to revise the manual and answer the FAQs. Once we get our draft manual done, we will conduct a focus group interview to test the clarity and understandability of the new sections produced, and potential participants of the interview will be chosen by the Fresh Choice Kitchens. After that, we will finalize the manual with regards to the responses from the focus group, and then achieve the final version of the manual and the answers to the FAQs.

Thank you for reading our postings and see you next week!

Week 2: TRC Event + Update

Food accessibility, Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350

Most classes were cancelled on Wednesday, September 18 – the first of the four days surrounding the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in Vancouver. Launched in 2008, this was the last TRC held on the west coast; the last event will be held in Ottawa 2014.  TRC is a national-wide event to collect survivors’ testimonies and to inform the public about the impact of residential schools on Aboriginal communities. Multiple programs and events were taking place around the UBC campus and at the Pacific National Exhibition (PNE).  Everyone was strongly encouraged to participate.  As UBC students who are using, studying and living on ancestral land from the Musqueams, it is only justified for us to learn more about the Aboriginals and hear their voice to what really happened during that grim period in Canadian history.  The stories told by the residential school survivors were quite upsetting. Children, as young as five, were forcibly separated from their communities and sent to the schools to assimilate to the mainstream Canadian society.  There were a great number of children who fell ill and did not return to their communities at all; mortality rates were over 50%. Even to this day, residential schools had a tremendous and profound impact on survivors as well as their communities. Survivors, recovering from sexual, physical and physiological abuse, had a difficult time integrating back to their communities and some were even passing the aggressive behavior down to their own families.

Taken from www.trc.ca

I believe that many of us might not have known about this dark history of Canada if classes had not been suspended. And indeed, I think this was quite successful in raising the awareness of students, parents, faculty members and the community alike to recognize the truth behind the residential school system. The TRC reminds us of the significance of communicating and connecting with the entire community, which is also relevant to what we learned about in class about social responsibility and connecting with others. Aboriginals are the first settlers to arrive and have generously offered to share their ancestral land for our benefits.  They are our neighbors, partners and teachers; there is actually so much we can learn from them. For instance, it is well-known that Aboriginals know the land the best and their traditional way of living harmoniously with nature can be applied to our Western lifestyle.  We should take the time to assist them in their long journey to recovery and cultural preservation since the Aboriginals are also a fundamental part of Canadian history.

If you want to understand more about the history of the residential school system, there is actually an exhibition on the St. Michael’s Residential School being held at the Museum of Anthropology right on the grounds of UBC. Check out this link for more information: http://moa.ubc.ca/experience/exhibit_details.php?id=1209

Here is our group’s update regarding the project!

Our first site visit, represented by Drew and Jasmine, with the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society (GVFBS) on September 18 went exceptionally well.  We had the pleasure of meeting both the Manager and the Web Outreach of the Fresh Choice Kitchen Program. They mentioned that the GVFBS has recently launched a new mandate that not only focuses on providing nourishing emergency foods, but to better educate the public about safe food practices. Their wish is our LFS 350 group to incorporate the scientific portion to the “Train-the-Trainer” workshop with “usability” in mind in terms of language, literacy and geographical application, i.e. both Vancouver and Vernon. The course will be taught to a wide range of audience and should be understandable for those without a science background, i.e. food facilitators, health organizations, chefs, individuals with canning experience, Aboriginals and Environmental Health Officers. The questions that my group suggested during our first meeting were also answered at this time. One of the proposed volunteer opportunities appeared to very promising; it would involve sorting cans or warehouse products every few years.  Although “warehouse or can sorting” may sound mundane, the participant would be given the opportunity to witness the change in food donation choices over the years as there is a growing interest in nutritional eating. Our group promised to send our project’s timeline to GVFBS once we have our proposal finalized at our next group meeting.  To date, we have received an electronic copy of the current manual and are waiting for the compilation of questions that have already been answered.  See you the following week!

Week 1: Introduction to Our Group

Food Processing, Food security, LFS 350, Sustainable food resources

Welcome to our blog!

This is a blog created by a group of students from the LFS 350 course that is working with the Greater Vancouver Food Bank Society – Fresh Choice Kitchens for a research project throughout the term. The main purpose of this blog is to share with others about our progress on the research project, as well as to share thoughts and other exciting news on related topics. Our project, ” The Science of Canning”, mainly focuses on helping Fresh Choice Kitchens to revise their current manual given to their canning instructors and add in scientific concepts to clearly illustrate the science behind safe canning practices.

Our group members include Amy Huang, Bonnie Chan, Drew Bondar, Jasmine Lee, Joyce Liao, Nathan Lee and Sophie Dong. (Check out our personal introductions on the “Team members” page!) During our first meeting, we shared our reasons for choosing this project: some of us would like to apply our knowledge from food processing courses to real-life settings, while others may be entirely new to canning and are eager to learn more about it through this project. During our first meeting, apart from familiarizing with each other, we also set some ground rules, which we think are four important points we should always keep in mind when working as a group:

  1) All members should take responsibility for the project
– contribute equally and proactively!
– keep up with the progress and finish designated parts before deadlines
– check Google Doc and/or Connect group discussion board regularly for group
discussions and project updates
2) Meet up at least once a week for discussions and to update individual progress
– let the others know beforehand if you cannot attend a meeting and check for updates          on the project on Google Doc and/or Connect group discussion board
3) Don’t hesitate to speak up!
– feel free to let other members know if you need help
– don’t be afraid to express your own opinions
4) Respect others!

We also discussed on our strengths and preferences when working in a group and we identified the different roles within members. We have Drew as the communicator for contacting the community partner and Bonnie as the blog administrator for the overall maintenance of this blog. We also decided that all group members will take turns writing weekly blogs so that we can all have experience in expressing our thoughts and communicating with the community through the internet.

After our first meeting, Drew has contacted our community partner through email and he has scheduled a time in the following week to meet up with them and further discuss the project objectives. Drew and Jasmine will be representing our group to visit our community partner. However, before their visit, we will all meet up to discuss on possible questions that we would like to ask our community partner, as well as to start brainstorming for the project proposal and divide up the work. After the visit, Drew and Jasmine will update us about their discussion with the community partner so that we can incorporate that into our ideas for the proposal. Everyone will work on their designated parts of the proposal and we aim that we can formulate a draft for the proposal by week 3.

Thank you for reading our first blog entry! We will update soon on our progress in week 2!