Blog Post #1: New Beginnings

 

“WHY IS THE FOOD SYSTEM SO WHITE?”

– From our group discussion with Brenda (Vancouver Arts Parks Board Programmer) and Stephanie (UBC LFS 350 Coordinator and Intercultural Coordinator/Developer with Parks Board)

The dominant discourse of food is publicly conveyed throughout our society, and especially in our city. It’s difficult to resist the bombardments of public call-outs, insisting each of us eat a certain way and think a certain way about the food system. It’s easy to only see one side of Vancouver’s food system sphere, but when one ventures to the other side, it is a whole new world. We are aiming to deconstruct and delve into this world and to see what is seemingly hidden from the public eye.

COLLECTIVE THOUGHTS –

Group Interests:

Although we all have different interests individually, we do have one thing in common: the idea of wanting to make something that would be left on the internet for the world to see and learn from. Podcasting and blogging are interesting ways to document our experiences and learning, and are becoming increasingly relevant in the social media landscape of today. With our journey forward, working with the Sustenance Festival, we are super excited to get started and to leave our mark on the community!

Collective Goals:

As a group of like-minded students and active participants in the Vancouver food system, we are hoping to gain an understanding of the unsung heroes of the food system. We are hoping to actively learn and get our hands dirty, and most of all we are hoping to make a difference. After meeting with our community partner, the Sustenance Festival, we were delighted to learn that their goals align closely with ours. We are excited to participate in the hidden discourse of the food system narrative!

Reasons for being here:

We all had our own reasons for choosing the participate in this project, but overall we were all drawn to the podcast aspect. This way of being able to communicate different issues and ideas related to food through social media and create a long lasting impression that can benefit the community was something that we found to be worthwhile and an exciting challenge.

What we hope to gain:

Each of us comes from different backgrounds but just like our aptly named blog, we all share the desire to make a difference. We have all experienced undergrad in much the same way, learning theoretically through the same learning environments year after year. This is an exciting opportunity to experience active learning, where we can produce a deliverable and release it into the local food system and watch it flourish and grow.

BIG PICTURE IDEAS –

Project Objectives:

As a group our objectives lay primarily in participation and the documentation of the Sustenance Festival as it strives to meet its 2018 goal of diversifying the local food movement.  Feedback from community members and past participants raised concerns around a lack of diversity in festival goers and a need to bring in members of various ethnic and socio-economic groups so as to provide a more accurate reflection of Vancouver’s population.  Vancouver Parks, working in partnership with the Sustenance Festival, form the pair of community organizations we’ll be working with directly.  Our method of documentation will be primarily through a series of podcasts, a format that’s recent increase in popularity means our work will hopefully reach a wide audience.  Our goal is to produce a few episodes that contain archival footage of interviews with members of Vancouver’s various ethnic groups discussing their thoughts, feelings and ideas around the local food movement.

First Impressions

When we first heard about the Sustenance festival, we were happy to find they shared a similar spirit as ours in regards to their outlook on the festival.  We immediately noticed the strong emphasis it had on community and community development. Speaking with Brenda and Stephanie then helped up to really understand their asset-based approach to this and community building.  It seems their approach starts with the question, “what do you have to offer” as opposed to “what is it you need?” What we found was that the team at Sustenance wanted to empower the local community by focusing on each of their groups’ strengths and what they could contribute in highlighting food justice in Vancouver.

 

In addition, we noticed their strong responsiveness to community feedback. In Ernesto Sirolli’s TED Talk, he emphasized that what international development needed was not a team of foreign experts that looked at what was missing, but a team of listeners that focused on what they had. Communities need teams that work for them, putting their interests first, not work with them. Sirolli stated that the only time he actually saw any of his projects make long-lasting impacts was when he decided to “shut up and listen.” We saw this exact attitude in Brenda and Stephanie, who noticed that their Sustenance festival was not having the reach they had hoped for. Rather than continue on their project and say “this is what they need and this is what we want to do,” they instead listened to community members and tried to incorporate their wants and needs into the project. Knowing that our community partners put people first gives us the confidence to work more with them in the weeks to come.

 

 

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