Welcome back everyone! Thank you for continuing on our food security adventure in the community with us. Are you curious about the project we have developed with PCRS? Keep reading to learn about the exciting project we are working on and to find out how we are going to make a push towards food security at Pacific Community Resources Society.

WEEKLY OBJECTIVES

We acknowledge that although project implementation should ideally have a more rigid structure, this is not always (more often than not!) the case when working closely with community partners. A project approach with more flexibility will allow us to not only adapt to new changes as they arise, but to deal with challenges as well. However, we hope to achieve these goals through tentative weekly objectives:

  1. Establish list of interview questions by early-mid February to survey each youth center location.
  2. Attend meetings with youth center staff at three locations and carry-out interviews in mid-February (reading break).
  3. Analysis of findings and interview results by late-February/early-March
  4. Follow-up interviews (phone, in person), as more questions arise, if necessary (early/mid-March)
  5. Follow up analysis and improvements to current proposal, fine-tuning recommendations (mid/late March)
  6. Project wrap-up: debrief among group members and debrief with community partners on outcomes of the PCRS project (end of LFS 350).

ACHIEVEMENTS

Although we are still in the beginning phases of our project, we are proud of the achievements we have accomplished thus far:

  1. Visited the Broadway Youth Resource Centre to gain a further understanding of how PCRS operates and the programs it provides.
  2. Worked with our community partners, Will, and Carrie to develop a project proposal that aims to align food purchasing at PCRS with PCRS values: LFS350ProjectProposal.
  3. Taken action to make further progress with our project by scheduling visits to the Guildford and Newton PCRS youth centres.

UPCOMING OBJECTIVES AND WAYS TO ACHIEVE

An upcoming objective will be to compile a list of interview questions to give to staff involved in food purchasing at the Newton, Guildford, and Broadway youth centers. These questions will address the values PCRS wants to improve regarding how food is purchased, where food is purchased, how food is stored, and general efficiency of the system. In order to formulate relevant questions for each youth center, we will do research on their respective locations to find out which stores and food suppliers are within close proximity. Furthermore, we will find out the relative size of each centre and the number of facilities and programs at each center. This information will help us gain a further understanding on their capacities and the number of youth they are supporting.

After formulating the questions, our next step will be to contact the PCRS administrative team to set up dates to visit the three locations. An objective to achieve for the interviews during our visits is to minimize inter-interviewer bias. We will ensure that we are retrieving valid and reliable information by meeting as a group before the interviews to calibrate the way we ask the questions.

We hope to contact all staff involved in food purchasing at each location, including those not present during our visit. This objective will be achieved by emailing the staff absent during our visit and asking them to participate in our research. If we are met with compliance, we will either email them the interview questions to complete or conduct phone interviews.

SUMMARY OF A MOMENT OF SIGNIFICANCE

What?

A moment of significance was shared among our group during our visit to the Broadway Youth Resource Centre (BYRC). Before we went to the BYRC, our group was struggling to develop a project that would meet the requirements of this LFS 350 course and benefit our community partners. We decided that we needed first-hand experience at a PCRS facility to gain a better understanding of how the organization operates and how our team can fit into this organization. Our trip to BYRC gave us a lot of clarity on our project development. We had the opportunity to tour the centre, which allowed us to learn about all the programs and services BYRC offers to help support youth in the Broadway area. We were all impressed by various aspects of the Broadway Youth Resource Centre, such as the industrial kitchen on the first floor of the facility. We were also able to see the youth utilize the services at the BYRC. In particular, we noticed how there was a sense of community in the facility. There was a diverse group of youth interacting with each other and the staff, and we could see that the individuals at the BYRC felt welcome and comfortable. In other words, we were able to witness PCRS values, such as diversity, community, and inclusiveness, being displayed in the actions of the individuals at the Broadway Youth Resource Centre (Pacific Community Resources Society, 2016).

After our tour, we had a chance to brainstorm project ideas with our main contact at PCRS, Andrea, and other staff members at BYRC. We left our visit knowing what the staff at the Broadway Youth Resource Centre hopes our group can accomplish this term and with an understanding of how a PCRS facility operates. We felt a sense of relief because we had a new level of knowledge and understanding of PCRS that would allow us to take a step forward in developing our term project.

So what?

By being able to see first-hand how PCRS’s values are incorporated into their programs, it gave us a better understanding of the values that PCRS believes in and the values that we should be trying to instill in their food purchasing decisions. We realized that before this visit, we were jumping too quickly into developing a project without fully understanding the situation we are dealing with. That is, we had the background knowledge of the PCRS values and the PCRS programs, but we did not have an understanding of how the PCRS values are implemented into their programs. Our visit to the BYRC allowed us to ask questions and make these connections. We mentioned Ernesto Sirolli’s TED Talk (2012) in our first blog, and we found ourselves still relating to Ernesto Sirolli’s argument of listening to individuals that you are trying to help before coming up with solutions to problems that you think exist. By going to the Broadway Youth Resource Centre, we took a step back and listened to the concerns of the staff and saw which values appear to be important to PCRS. We were then finding ourselves coming up with more practical project plans that met our course objectives and met the hopes of our partners at PCRS than we originally were in the first few weeks of the course.

The approach we took to develop a project is similar to that of the systems model described by Tom Wujec in his TED Talk on making toast (2015). The nodes described in his model are represented by the parties involved in food purchasing at PCRS. Our goal is to identify all of the nodes and to find links between them. We started our understanding of the food purchasing problem by talking to administrative staff (our first node). After visiting the BYRC, we learned that there there may be a missing link between PCRS administration and food purchasers, which could be causing more problems in the decision making process. Therefore, it was helpful to see how BYRC operates because this visit gave us an opportunity to identify more nodes in the food purchasing system and to make more connections that allow us to understand the complexity of PCRS. Our greater understanding of the complexity allows us to design a project that will produce valid and reliable results, which can lead us to finding practical and helpful recommendations for PCRS.

Now what?

Moving forward, we will continue to apply this approach of systems thinking to our project. For example, our project aims to align food purchasing with PCRS values (please see our project proposal for more details). To accomplish this task, we need to identify which suppliers are linked to PCRS purchasers and where these suppliers are getting their food from. Thus to get to the root of the food purchasing problem, we are going to ask staff involved in food purchasing questions regarding their purchasing decisions to make the first link between PCRS and their food suppliers. If we can continue with this systems thinking approach throughout our project, we believe that it will allow us to keep a grasp on our project goals and allow us to use the connections we find to identify misalignments between PCRS values and food purchasing.

WRAP UP

Although we initially felt overwhelmed by our project, we feel like we have created a reasonable schedule to tackle this project, as outlined in our weekly objectives. We are excited to move forward with our project because it is our chance to apply the knowledge we have learned in the classroom to improve food security for individuals in the Lower Mainland. Thank you for reading our blog and be sure to read our next post to learn about our findings from our interviews with PCRS staff.

References:

Pacific Community Resources Society. (2016). Our Values. Retrieved from http://www.pcrs.ca/about-us/our-values/

TED. (2015). Tom Wujec: Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_vS_b7cJn2A

TED. (2012). Ernesto Sirolli:Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!. Retrieved from https://www.ted.com/talks/ernesto_sirolli_want_to_help_someone_shut_up_and_listen