We Happen Reflection: We did a recent project in the 8th grade on The Human Food chain, and how food is processed, grown and made. I also learned that other children in elementary school should get a good habit with consuming healthy and nutritious, so it is something that they stick with while they grow up. This is why this was an interesting problem for me, Sophia Morrison, Jeremy Ong, Joseph Guys, Leah Maxwell and Oliver Scott to tackle with our non-profit. With the prior knowledge we had with agriculture and the process on how food grows, we wanted to collaborate with our community to acknowledge the problem with the lack of food justice mainly focusing on young children. Throughout this project I learned about the different opportunities in our community through research, interviewing and volunteering.
We researched our problem on food justice and found the basics and important information we needed. Throughout our first needs assessment presentation our group found other non-profit organizations that were already working with students to teach them about the importance of healthy and nutritious food in their life. This gave us examples of what organizations are already doing and what we can contribute or continue. There are many non-profits doing this type of work in the US and some are Jamies Food Kitchen, Kitchen For Goods, Food Power and Growing Power. All these organization have something in common and benefiting the community in a tremendous way. This helped discover how much different opportunities we can individually help out with. Theres many programs for different age groups young and older teens, so we can all get involved by growing our local community in a better way. While a great amount of our work included researching for connections. That lead us too contacting people who have expertise with our problem.
Our group interviewed a couple of people throughout the project. We interviewed Bianca Bonilla and she works with North River Gardening a non-profit organizations and they are focused on bringing agriculture and fresh food to low income families. What stuck with us when she talked about “Having the opportunity to have this exposure of growing food at such a young age is very beneficial and begins positive future habits surrounding food choices, health, and interest in ecology and farming.” We learned that focusing on elementary schoolers especially ages from 5-8 about food choices we could change the view when they grow up. While working with Bianca Bonilla we were taught the opportunities they have for children to get involved. They get their students involved with hands on activities with their school garden. Through conducting interviews we learned the different information we can get, and the connections that the interviewers give to us. There are many interested people that our willing to share what their nonprofits are about, but along with interviews many people our wanting your help to expand their business.
Theres many volunteering opportunities in our community. We can benefit from learning new things and ways to do things from experts in those fields. During our visit with North River Gardening we had the chance to work with Bianca Bonilla the manger of the garden to maintain their garden. We worked in the garden by picking out the crops, so they can remove the plant and use that space for garden beds so they can put vegetable plants that benefit them. This showed me how doing work for nonprofits and volunteering for them can give us experiences and opportunities to learn new hobbies, interest and see how little things could help others in a big way. It is very simple to get involved with organizations, but takes time to make an impact. If we all contribute and help our community in some way we can solve the problems that we are dealing with today.
These are the main points I have learned in this project, I learned about the different opportunities in our community through research, interviewing and volunteering. By conducting research before finding a problem is a major key for success. We can all learn important things from other people that have a better or a different view of the situations. Working with others can help find the problems in our local community. By solving a problem in our community can lead to more and more problems being solved.