Proposal Report

LFS350_Group3_ProposalReport

Previous Weeks’ Objectives

Over the past couple weeks, our main objectives have been to draft and complete the project proposal report. While this was the main focus, our other objectives included maintaining active communication with Joanne by being in regular contact through email and scheduling a time to meet face-to-face. Other objectives have included:

• Learn more about the Hastings-Sunrise area and determine current food accessibility barriers
• As a group determine what we would like to get from this project and how we can best go about this
• Come up with a tentative schedule involving which group member would attain which focus group training session

Week of February 8 – 15 Objectives

This week, our community partner, Joanne, contacted us and informed our group that there had been a scope shift and the timeline of our original project would not be possible. As a result, we decided that it was necessary to meet with Joanne to determine what our new project would encompass. Our other objectives for the week included:

• Choose project from list of options Joanne had given us
• Adjust schedules according to changes
• Create new timeline for project
• Write new proposal for community project

Looking Forward: Upcoming Objectives

Having completed our proposal report last week, we are now on our way to taking what we have proposed and transforming it into reality. Our future objectives are to:

• Touch base with prospective businesses in the Little-Riley Mountain park area to provide them with information about our project and to give them a heads-up that we will be contacting them in a few weeks
• Familiarize ourselves with each of the businesses we will be contacting by learning about their history, background and mission
• Formulate a standardized set of questions to ask business and community partners
• Go to Little-Riley Mountain Park and actually start contacting businesses

Achievements 

As busy as we have been these past weeks, our group managed to stay in contact with Joanne as we encountered, and now continue to maneuver through, an unexpected hurdle. We were notified that our original project plan with Hastings-Sunrise Community Food Network was put on hold, and that some major changes may occur. Although this news was not ideal, we worked to embrace the changes and the uncertainty that comes with collaborating with real community projects.

Over the course of the past week we worked together and finished our proposal, which reflects our project plan prior to the change, as we only found out what our new role would be after the proposal was due. Fortunately, we are able to maintain the same guiding principles that we outlined in our proposal, and apply our research to our new project plan.

This past Monday we met with Joanne to discuss the new project focus. We are eager to begin the new project, and feel that collectively we can do something great with it. Being able to readily shift the scope of our project so drastically and take it in stride is a major accomplishment that can be difficult for students when a grade is at stake. It is important to acknowledge that this project is not only about our grade, but also about a community and that real people are counting on us to get the job done.

What?

Last week, we were advised that our initial project with HSCFN Community Food Circles, was not going to proceed as planned, and therefore our project assessing food access and barriers would not come to fruition within the timeframe of the semester. After some discussion with Joanne, we will now be working with the Little-Mountain Riley Park Food Network (LMRPFN) on the Nourish Your Neighbourhood (NYN) initiative. Based on preliminary information, we will be designing a checklist of possible fundraising ideas and will be directly contacting and distributing them to local businesses in Vancouver. Several businesses have donated in past fundraisers; we will contact both previous and new prospective businesses to participate. These businesses will have the opportunity to communicate their capacity to participate for the next NYN fundraising campaign, occurring in October 2016, through these checklists. A few of the items on our checklist include:

• Direct monetary donations
• A portion of proceeds from a given sale item
• Proceeds from a private ticketed event
• Donation of garden tools and equipment
• Gift baskets

So What?

While we were told to expect uncertainty and embrace it with flexibility, our group was not expecting to have an entirely different project halfway through the term. However, when the timeline of our original project shifted and it no longer aligned with the class dates, we were unsure for a period of time about how to proceed with our work. But, our group is very excited about the new project that we perhaps have even more interest in and welcome the chance to put our efforts towards it. The NYN is a fundraising campaign in support of food security with a particular focus on access to food, that will invite local businesses in the Little-Mountain Riley Park neighbourhood to participate in their own chosen way. Comparable to the interdisciplinary approach that we discussed in the first plenary session, each business will have the opportunity to share their addition to the project. Although the businesses will all be related to food, each one of them has a niche and a unique input to the fundraiser, whether it be a popular dish they will offer the proceeds of for a day, or produce specials that will encourage customers to put their money towards improving food security in the area. We will work together with the organizations to find contributions that are in line with their company interests as well as the interests of the fundraising campaign to eliminate the “blind spots” for a well-rounded set of fundraising offerings.

Now what?

As a result of this shift our group is going to need to gain knowledge on how to make a successful survey and will need to prepare a survey in time to distribute it to businesses before our project deadline. In the next few weeks we will be working as a group to learn about surveys and the LMRP neighbourhood businesses based on previous data from past NYN campaigns. In addition to the hard-skills needed to accomplish this project, our group will also need to put effort into exploring the community dynamics and discovering how different sectors can work in their own way to support food security.

INTRODUCTIONS

“I became quite proud of our project… because, you see, at least we fed the hippos!” (E. Sirolli, 2012). 

The quote above is an excerpt from the TED Talk “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!”, by Ernesto Sirolli. Sirolli made this statement with respect to the failure of his agriculture project in Zambia (instead of feeding the community, the crops were eaten by hippos), and how he believes the project’s of other NGOs in the region failed even worse. Sirolli is trying to make the point that listening to the needs of the community before attempting to help them is key to success. We found this quote particularly insightful because as mentioned above in our bios, we have all worked with community projects and understand the barriers to successfully achieving the results we set out to achieve prior to the project. We also have been learning about Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) (discussed later in this post), which aligns with this video and has given us our own passion to help the Hastings Sunrise Community by listening to their needs and wants.

WHY HASTINGS SUNRISE?

            As a group, we chose the Hastings Sunrise Community Food Circles project because we believe it will strengthen our interdisciplinary skills as well as our connection to the Vancouver community. We believe that by participating in this project we will be able to develop our food security knowledge by reflecting on past personal experiences and by integrating our education from various food related disciplines. Combined with our interests in promoting food security, nutrition and sustainable agriculture, the Hastings Sunrise project is ideal because it encompasses all of our passions into one engaging experience. Those of us involved in food and nutrition will be able to use our nutrition and health knowledge to determine what food is suitable for ensuring healthy individuals in the Hastings Sunrise area. While, those in food security and global resources disciplines will be able to use their knowledge in developing sustainable food practices that are environmentally conscious. Within this project, our goal is to further develop our communication and interpersonal skills so that we can implement these skills into future careers.  Furthermore, we intend to gain a better understanding of how food insecurity affects those in the Hastings Sunrise area and what can be done to combat this issue.  We can do this by building new relationships within the Vancouver community and finding what food can be locally sourced. By doing this, we hope to improve access to affordable, sustainable, nutritious and culturally appropriate food for individuals living in the Hastings Sunrise community.

WHAT IS THE HASTINGS SUNRISE COMMUNITY FOOD NETWORK?

               Hastings Sunrise Community Food Network (HSCFN) is a food systems initiative focused on the area of Hastings Sunrise in North East Vancouver, which has emerged from the city-wide group, Vancouver Neighbourhood Food Network (“Who We Are”, 2015). This community level food network was formed in 2012 in order to connect key players in the food system within this area, and therefore strengthen individual initiatives such as community gardens or food programs (“Who We Are”, 2015). Objectives of the network include connecting and supporting its residents towards accessing affordable and healthy food within their community. Through our work with Hastings Sunrise, we will aim to identify the barriers of accessing food by attending both the training of facilitators and the facilitator-run focus groups with the residents. There, we will observe commonly expressed barriers and issues that residents face with regards to accessing food, attending programs and we will compile our data from the focus groups run atWHAT five different agencies, Hastings-Sunrise, Kiwassa Neighbourhood House, Frog Hollow Neighbourhood House, Thunderbird Community Centre, and The Warehouse and produce both an individual and collective report on these agencies. This report will outline these barriers and general themes that arise from the focus groups and suggest ways to support members in reducing these food gaps. HSCFN can then utilize this information to direct their support and funding, and be able to better address the needs of the community as a whole, while also attending to the diversity between neighbourhoods (J. MacKinnon, personal communication, January 18th, 2016).

WHAT HAVE WE DONE SO FAR?

              This week we met with Joanne MacKinnon, the Food Network Coordinator for the Hastings Sunrise Community. Prior to our group’s first meeting with Joanne we were uncertain about what roles we would have in this community project because we were slightly unclear about the project itself and there appeared to be many opportunities for involvement available to our group. Joanne gave us a thorough overview of the different components involved in the Hastings-Sunrise Community Food Network and provided us with a better understanding of the project goal: what are the barriers for community members to accessing healthy food and how can we better serve these members with respect to those barriers? The focus groups and final reflection of the Food Circle project is in-line with the Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) because we are tasked with assisting community members (the facilitators) with engaging and listening to other community members who are categorized as part of the ‘hard-to-reach’ populations. Instead of the staff of the Food Circle trying to fix the issues that they are encountering by themselves, they have chosen to reach out and ask the participants and non-participants in the community what they want to see and how the program could improve.

HOW DOES THIS RELATE TO WHAT WE ARE LEARNING IN LFS 350?

          As discussed in the TED Talk “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!”, by Ernesto Sirolli, listening to the community you are trying to help is a very important step in offering aid (E. Sirolli, 2012). The community responded with requests for workshops for activities such as cooking or gardening, but despite efforts to engagement for all community members, the workshops still did not reach every target population. Thus, the Food Circles steering committee is taking a step back and asking community members at focus group meetings if people wish to be helped at all, and if they do, then how can we help achieve better access to healthy food (E. Sirolli, 2012). These focus group sessions take on an asset-based approach rather than deficit-based by following several guiding principles of ABCD, such as actively listening to community members, allowing them to contribute, and bringing facilitators and focus groups from all five of the agencies participating in the Food Network.

References:
Who We Are. (2015). Hastings Sunrise Community Food Network. Retrieved January 20, 2016, from http://hscfn.com/who-we-are/