Farewell

The end of the school year is approaching and for some of us, the end of our undergrad! As upper years, we’ve experienced academic highs and lows, and group projects of all kind. This group project in particular, was definitely one of the most memorable experiences our undergrad.

In this blog post, we’d like to share with you the final moments of this community-centered effort:

What?

Probably the biggest moment of significance we’ve experienced thus far was our Infographic presentation. Not only did we get to showcase a term’s worth of effort, but we also got to interact with classmates and various visitors to learn about all of the projects and activities that everyone worked so hard on!

Here is our infographic!

So what?

The moments leading up to our presentation were full of plenty of group discussions. In order to create a meaningful infographic poster that was both engaging and insightful, we had to refer back to our course concepts. This included our AER papers and our lectures/discussions on ethnicity in the food system, asset-based community development, and the local Vancouver food movements.

We used the AER outlines to give our poster and clear and definite structure. This way, no matter how the infographic was graphically designed, the message it conveyed was preserved.
Secondly, we drew upon our discussions on ethnicity to provide context to our poster. As the Sustenance Festival aims to promote a more inclusive and culturally diverse food movement, we felt that the points made in class helped to strengthen the project’s significance. In our interactions with other students, we were also able to refer back to the Chinese-Canadian farmers topic that Colin referred to in class.
Next, we used the idea of asset-based community development (ABCD) to provide an introduction to our project. Since our podcast project was driven by the Sustenance Festival’s community listening campaign in 2017, we felt it important to emphasize their asset-based approach in an intriguing hook to audiences. With many of the participants being our fellow classmates, we believe that using a class-discussed concept like ABCD would be a surefire way to connect with them.
Finally, in our talks, we related our project to the other projects in LFS 350 by integrating them into the local Vancouver food movement. By putting things into perspective, we believed that audiences would be better able to how all our combined efforts were somehow working to change the food system.

Now what?

Although we had finished the infographic and presentation, we will still use it as a reference and going to write our final report based on the content we put in the infographic. With the final report coming up, we’re working extensively on writing it! However, due to some drawbacks (in script approval), our group is also focused on writing our scripts and compiling our podcasts. Since we have already identified the significance, method, purpose, and implication when we were completing infographic, it will not take us long to continue finishing them in the final report.

Parting Reflections

This project was a unique and challenging learning experience that taught us how to work with community partners, diverse teammates, and social issues surrounding food. We hope to these podcasts will be a tool used to open people’s minds towards cultural activities within the Vancouver food movement.

Firstly, we’d like to thank our community partners: Brenda, Steph, and Rebecca for their cooperation and efforts towards inclusivity in Vancouver. We also want to thank Tori, our TA, and Will, our professor, for guiding us on this journey. We had a lot of fun working on this and look forward to the development of future projects for the Sustenance Festival!

These past few weeks have been full of hard work. We finally narrowed down our podcast content, we wrote our podcast script, we recorded our podcast at VPL’s Inspiration Lab, and we had so much fun. Each group member really brought their A-game to our VPL recording session, which felt really rewarding, especially with all the ambiguousness that came with our last blog post (recall: hell week).* Not only were we able to record and finish one of our two planned podcasts, we were also able to start planning the script for our next and final podcast.**

Our first podcast looks at the main goals of the Sustenance festival, delving into the barriers to inclusion for marginalized groups. We go over the main findings from the interviews that were conducted by the festival, focusing on the key messages and identified issues of selected groups, tying them back to the theme of sustenance. The purpose of this first podcast was to introduce our themes, attempting to tell a story surrounding the importance of community participation and engagement and their role in the festival. We found ourselves referencing class material while we were writing our podcast script.

The lecture topics, although very concise, were revelatory for the majority of our group members. We all felt that this information (especially topics surrounding gender and race) was key to talking our community project, even though it made us a bit uncomfortable. We felt it was imperative to be educated about these concepts, as we wanted our narrative to be impartial and objective. Our group resonated with the paper ‘Parallel alternatives: Chinese-Canadian farmers and the Metro Vancouver local food movement’, as we found that many of the unrepresented groups interviewed by the festival had were participating in alternative cultural food movements.

When our group spent some time reflecting on last week’s ‘moment of change’ graph, were all pleasantly surprised to find that our expectations versus reality for that week were very different. We found the experience of recording our first podcast to be extremely rewarding and found that writing the script allowed us to solidify the knowledge we learned in class. Our ‘moment(s) of change’ occurred while we were writing our podcast script. The concepts that we were focused on in class were some what open-ended and vague, so when we all sat down to focus on producing our script which was focused on inclusion and race, we were able to apply the concepts from lecture. This became significant for our group, acting almost as an ‘Aha!’ moment in the sense that we suddenly became more aware of our positionality and the cautiousness that we must have in our script. Speaking on behalf of the Sustenance Festival as well as for multiple under-represented groups is an honour, and this process has solidified the fact that we must take it seriously. The moment of change activity allowed our group to refocus on past failures and past successes. Our morale for the past few weeks has been extremely low and it was very encouraging to be able to check in as a team and to address why we felt this way. You can find our updated graph (which includes expectations vs. reality) below:

You can find a link to our weekly objective schedule here. Minor tweaks to the weekly schedule for week 3 include the following:

We had an extremely positive experience recording our podcast at VPL’s inspiration lab, so we will continue to use it as our venue for the next podcast recording.
After receiving our marks for the AER outline, we collectively would like to report that our “anticipation of a rewarding experience” has declined slightly, along with our hopes and dreams.
We are still planning to finish up our script for podcast #2 on the weekend of the 18th, as we are aware that our group presentation is March 26th.

In terms of our group achievements, we managed to be extremely proactive and to accomplish all of the tasks we had set out to do, including:

Finished individual AER outline
Finished writing script for podcast #1
Finished recording podcast #1

Here are some of our group strategy to help us complete our task this week:

We had already made a schedule last week and clearly knew what was our objectives this week(which are the tasks we accomplished ↑).
We made the appointment for the use of the recording room and prepared the scripts before we recorded the podcast. Also, a webchat group discussion helped us improve individual parts in the podcast.
Finally, no matter we had had lunch or not, we all arrived at the VPL on time and recorded our podcast and the rap successfully.

For the following weeks we will:

Avoid meeting on busy days (eg. dues, quizzes) but keep in contact more often online.
Complete tasks earlier.
If we cannot hold a meeting with every member present, we can do some smaller group meetings(better than none).
Stick to the schedule if possible.
Finally, breathe and smile.

*Extra special shoutout to Jeff, who works at the VPL Inspiration Lab and was able to organize our session!

**We also found time to record a food justice RAP SONG. Which can be found below.

(Disclaimer: THIS RAP WAS NOT PLANNED, it was a true freestyle and a happy accident).

Month: March 2018

Blog Post #4

Farewell

What?

So what?

Now what?

Blog Post #3: A Graceful (?) Dismount