Executive Summary

Introduction

             The Little Mountain-Riley Park Neighbourhood Food Network (LM-RP NFN) aims to improve food access of its residents by increasing accessibility through connecting residents with healthy, affordable, culturally appropriate food through events, gardens, and programs. (“LM-RP Neighbourhood Food Network (NFN)”, n.d.). The Nourish Your Neighbourhood campaign works with local businesses to raise funds for the networks’ program, specifically the Little-Mountain Riley Park community garden.

            Asset-based community development (ABCD) is a framework that utilizes the knowledge and resources of community members, challenging the typical needs-based approach to development (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003). We will refer to ABCD principles, with a focus on developing human capacity. It is important to determine what each community already has to offer, and what programs effectively reach people, in order to see how they might extend the success, and work towards community food security.

Inquiry Question

            How to effectively recruit local businesses for a fundraising project. We want to gain insight into what encourages or deters a business to participate in a local fundraiser such as the Nourish Your Neighbourhood fundraiser.

Methods

• Augmented and refurbished the business contact list, including updated phone numbers and email addresses for over 122 businesses within the neighbourhood
• Updated the information letter
• Developed an online survey intended for all businesses to fill, regardless of interest in the fundraiser

Results

            Out of the 122 businesses that we contacted, we had a survey response from Little Mountain Shop and SweetSalt Bakery & Cafe expressing potential interest. Three businesses, Nesters Market, Earnest Ice Cream and The Locus, actively donated gift cards towards the fundraiser.  We have forwarded the survey responses to Joanne and she will likely contact the interested businesses closer to October. The information gathered from the few surveys give insight into the recruitment process and how to effectively engage business for future fundraisers.
Recommendations and Conclusion

            In the future, we would ideally recommend in-person contact with businesses. This would establish an initial relationship wherein the manager would have the opportunity to connect a face to the initiative as opposed to a virtual e-mail that can be easily discarded as spam. If this is not possible in all cases, a phone call would be next best method of communication. These methods establish a more personal relationship and interaction with the businesses which may give them more incentive to either participate. In addition, we would recommend having a physical copy of the survey to fill out in person or be verbally completed over the phone would prove beneficial in response volume. We hope Joanne will take these recommendations into consideration and implement them into future fundraising endeavors.   

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Moment of Significance

What

          In our flexible learning session two weeks ago, our group set out to approach the local businesses door-to-door about their potential participation in Nourish Your Neighbourhood. When we wrote our previous blog post, we were filled with much more optimism and perhaps were overzealous with our initial intention of reaching every businesses that did not have a contact email on our list. It should be noted that our list included every food-related business between the boundaries of 16th to 41st Ave, and Knight to Cambie. Hence, our first problem: the time constraint. With the three hours we had for our flexible learning session, including the transportation time required to travel from UBC to the Little Mountain-Riley Park neighbourhood and back, we decided to target Main Street. As we started approaching people door-to-door, we soon realized our second problem: we need to reach managers or store owners.

          As it turned out, managers are difficult to find at their business locations on a Monday afternoon. Without a manager present, we were unable to ask for participation in our fundraiser, and we could not gather valid survey responses, so we took down an email and carried on. It was not until we reached the Main Street Honey Shoppe when the store employee – not the manager – asked us what we are fundraising for. We explained that the purpose of the garden is to raise money for the community garden to support food security in the area. He said that this is our selling point, and we should make it a priority in our pitch rather than a secondary aspect. He also said that community members may be wondering why we, as UBC students and outsiders to the community, would be involved. This was a moment of significance for our group because when we made plans for this flexible learning session we did not anticipate the limitations that we faced, nor did we have great consideration of how we would be received by the community.

So What

            Almost as if Will read our minds, in Session 11 we discussed how we as a class are coming in as an outside organization with new ideas and imposing them onto the community. As the employee at The Honey Shoppe pointed out, our connection with the Little Mountain-Riley Park Community Food Network was not extremely clear to business owners and community members, and was likely shadowed by the fact that we are outsiders from a university collecting survey data. Typically university knowledge entering the community to assess what is needed is not an asset-based approach, it is usually considered deficit-based (Mathie & Cunningham, 2003). While the Nourish Your Neighbourhood campaign itself takes on an asset-based approach – it aims to add a garden to the neighbourhood to increase the existing state of food security, and which helps to foster citizen-to-citizen connections – it may seem deficit-based depending on who it was coming from. Maybe we were seen as a group of patronizing outsiders trying to save the community, when the purpose of our project is to raise money for a garden that will facilitate the community’s capacity to save itself.

            Admittedly when we started this project we had many ideas, suggestions, and perhaps unrealistic expectations. We were optimistic about what we could achieve and were excited about what we could contribute to this campaign, but did not fully consider if our goals were feasible or realistic. Hence, the slight disappointment with the lack of immediate results when we went door-to-door. We made a huge list of businesses but how were we going to reach them all? Did we really think that because we thought the fundraising campaign was a great idea and we are passionate about food security, that others will easily make that same connection? We were unsure of whether community food security would be a motivating factor for business owners to participate, but perhaps that information up front would have made a difference in the way we were perceived – as a group of people advocating for a cause connected to the neighbourhood rather than group simply collecting donations and survey responses.

Now What

              In retrospect, at the times when we were able to speak to a manager or store owner, more often than not we received a positive response and an interest in participating. However, the key point to those conversations always revolved around the community garden and how it was relevant to their community. It is possible to consider that if we made our door-to-door pitch very clearly about the garden, and spoke to store employees rather than solely asking for the manager, we would have received more interest, or the employees might have made a greater effort to encourage the manager to participate. It would have been difficult for us to not appear as outsiders simply because of the nature of this class and the timeline of the project. We had a relatively shorter duration with it, and were already discussing how we plan to accomplish a Graceful Dismount (see blog post 3) before we even reached our final flexible learning session. That initial point of contact with the businesses was very likely our first and last exchange before we would return the project to Joanne, so how do we go about avoiding the outsider effect? Perhaps if we had a presence in community it would have been easier to reach out, or if we had a longer commitment with the project to see it through until its launch in October, we would have had a more convincing voice.

Previous Weeks’ Objectives

Over the past couple weeks our main objective has been to decide on a project from the list of options given to us by our community partner Joanne. We decided to choose the Nourish Your Neighbourhood campaign in the Little Mountain-Riley Park area. In order to accomplish our primary objective, we did the following:

• Familiarized ourselves with the businesses in the Little Mountain-Riley Park area by learning about the demographics of the community.
• Synthesized an Excel worksheet that contains contact information of local businesses in LM-RP area and sort them by location.
• Maintained active communication with Joanne by being in contact through email.

Week of March 7 to 14

This week our main objective has been to redraft and complete our new project proposal. We would accomplish this by doing the following:

• Creating a template email that explains the Nourish Your Neighbourhood campaign that will be sent to local businesses
• Creating a survey that can be used to assess the reasons behind choosing to participate in or abstaining from the campaign.
• Touching base with Joanne to update her on our progress and to show her final copies of our survey and template email.
• Directly contacting local businesses by emailing them the template letter and a link to the survey.
• Formulating a tentative schedule involving which businesses will be visited in person on March 14.

Looking Forward: Upcoming Objectives

Having composed a template email and survey, our next objective is to contact businesses and determine who is interested in participating in the fundraiser. We will accomplish this by performing the following steps: 

• Meet in person with participating businesses to develop and understand their role in the fundraiser.
• Compile data on businesses’ participation as well as the barriers identified from the survey and in-person communications.
• Compare methods of contacting businesses and their success rates of receiving support.
• Start to prepare for the final report by discussing our results and what the best way to present them will be.

What

Achievements

As busy as our group has been with work from other classes, we have still managed to keep the Little Mountain-Riley Park community project a priority. The project change resulted in the need for a revised proposal report. Luckily, we were able to get together to formulate a new plan, while still using some of the guiding principles from our previous report.   

During the flexible learning session last week, our group got together and started researching businesses in the Little Mountain-Riley Park area. We compiled an Excel worksheet and effectively organized it by street. This was done in preparation for the next flexible learning session, during which we are planning to approach the businesses in person. We hoped that by synthesizing a comprehensive list containing information about the local businesses in the area, we would be able to make the process of recruiting businesses easier.

This past Monday we had a group meeting after class and we were able to accomplish many of our weekly objectives. As a group, we created a document that explains the Nourish Your Neighbourhood campaign and a survey that will help facilitate information behind the reason to choosing to participate in or abstain from the campaign.  We then sent this information to our community partner, Joanne, to receive feedback and see what can be improved on.

Moment of Significant Change Workshop
During session 9, our group had the opportunity to come together and reflect on our experiences individually throughout the process of the project. We created 4 graphs outlining two of our high points and two of our low points in the process. These include the following:

• Levels of Anxiety
  There is a common trend of anxiety levels, peaking during our time of project change and dipping back down during our flexible learning session in week 8. One member, outlined in orange, was absent at the time which resulted in her feeling a higher level of anxiety due to her involuntary inability to significantly contribute in the process.
  
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• Levels of Confusion
  This graph shows greater fluctuation among our team members. Some feeling more confused about our project at specific times than others. We realized that through our effective communication during week 8, the group was able to collectively sort out our tasks and responsibilities which alleviated some confusion for the majority of our members, as depicted on the graph.
  
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• Levels of Excitement
  While our levels of excitement momentarily dropped during the time of change, due to uncertainty and anxiety with the outcome of the course, it has since risen. We have collectively come to be more excited about this project than with our initial one because of the direct contact with prospective fundraisers and a higher perceived impact. One member was especially excited with the decision to switch projects.
  
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• Satisfaction with Group Members
  A few of our members have previously worked together in a group through LFS 250, and therefore were comfortable and acquainted with each other’s work ethic. Overall, our satisfaction within our group has had a steady increase. Some members plateaued at the point of project change due to the uncertainty of the situation.
  
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So What

The Moments of Significance workshop allowed our group to look back at the last nine weeks and identify high points and low points, summarizing as a group the things we found difficult and rewarding. This workshop gave us the opportunity to individualize the project and assess our own journey throughout the process. There were both common trends and differing feelings within the plots of each graph among each member and this workshop allowed us to discuss why these trends were the way they were and ultimately increased our team bond.

The group unanimously found that those significant moments early on, including meeting our group and finding out what project we were taking on, were points of excitement but also uncertainty. The reality of the workload of the class seemed to set in for all of us, bringing increasing levels of stress around the time of due dates for parts of our project. The project proposal allowed us to come together and determine how we would like our project to unfold. This quickly became irrelevant when our project underwent a scope shift. Having to adjust to a new project and revise our proposal was taxing on group morale, but we stuck through it.

Working hard on our new proposal ended up being another significant moment, occurring around week 8, where many of our group members began to feel ease in levels of stress and uncertainty. It was rewarding to see our vision for the new project become clear, and we are hopeful that further rewarding moments are close ahead as we begin to interact more directly with the local businesses in the Little-Mountain Riley-Park neighbourhood.

Difficult moments, such as feeling behind after the scope shift, brought out our group’s true colours. We are proud of the way our group has stayed positive and worked together.

We realized that despite having a major change in our project part way through, this was not actually the point of highest anxiety. This caused confusion and uncertainty, but we found that our anxiety increased within the following weeks due to perceived stagnancy within the new project and sudden reality that we had not made as much progress as desired. It was interesting and relieving to see other groups’ progress and insight into their own experiences. Each group’s high points and low points were unique. We look forward to the remainder of our project and working with Joanne.

The Graceful Dismount

Although our course is nearing its final stretch, the majority of our project still feels as though it has yet to take off. Our group has been hard at work composing the documents and lists necessary before we begin seeking out businesses to support the fundraiser. In preparation for our next flexible learning session on March 14th when we plan to go door-to-door to pitch the campaign, the remainder of this week leading up to it will be crucial. Our group must closely communicate and collaborate with Joanne to get approval for the advertisement we will be emailing and presenting to the potential contributors. Ideally the letter will incorporate our group’s ideas of what factors may entice businesses to be interested in participating, while also maintaining the core values of the campaign to promote and inform the public about food security and food as a basic human right. We are finalizing the accompanying online survey that we created to help collect data on the reasons for participating or not participating, and will bring an iPad to help facilitate convenience of responding. Our main goal is to increase the community support from the number it was at last year. With consideration to how difficult it will be to approach businesses and ask for their support, collecting feedback from them will help us adjust and improve our approach, and will certainly be useful information to consider for future years of this campaign.

Now What

Moving forward, we aim to have the tabulated results provided to Joanne by (whatever day we agree on) and an updated list of contact information of businesses that agreed to participate. Joanne’s contact information was provided in the letter to the businesses to establish her as the main person of contact once our group departs from the project at the end of the term. We hope that our involvement in the Nourish Your Neighbourhood campaign will help kickstart the event in a positive way with the time that we are committing to pursuing supporters, and the information we collect that may be helpful in future years.

– Group 3