Facing Food Insecurity Through Community
Going into this process of trying to understand how a community such as Fayetteville, Arkansas might face food insecurity, was daunting but my team, made up of Anna-Faith Pearson and Lupe Albarrán, and I knew that this was a worthwhile endeavor. We had to first understand what the daunting phrase food insecurity actually entails for the folks who experience it. Food insecurity is universally understood as the disruption of food intake or eating patterns due to a lack of money or other resources. After a few team brainstorming sessions, we concluded that a way to fight food insecurity would be to have community member grow produce themselves! Once we developed a solid how might we question regarding community gardening, our team headed into the first true phase of our investigation: secondary research and interviews. This was a crucial stage in our process because after speaking to the Volunteer Coordinator for Fayetteville Parks and Recreation, the Founder and Director of Affairs at a local farming initiative, and a community garden participant, it was clear that our how might we question would need to be revised. We learned that there are knowledge and experience barriers which often keep folks from being successful at growing their own food as well as understanding the negative effects food insecurity has on our community.
Next, our team moved into the second phase of exploration: primary research methods. For this extensive portion of our investigation, we utilized five different research methods in order to understand our audience more and hopefully gain some new insights into potential solutions. We began by sending out a questionnaire into the community. The results from this survey were very interesting and helped us to get a better understanding of the relationship our audience has with food and their community. We also discovered that over 40% of participants had experienced food insecurity at some point. This was a shocking statistic and it reinforced how important this research was. After that, we performed an observation at the two community gardens here in Fayetteville. We got to have a more in-depth conversation with the Volunteer Coordinator about the functionings of the space and here experiences of managing the gardens. Again, this experience reinforced the fact that community involvement makes all of the difference in these programs. They can not function on their own and need our time and attention in order to prosper as they should. Thirdly, our team conducted a photo study. We sent out image prompts to community members to capture and send back to us for compilation and analysis. There were some clear similarities and differences between all of the diverse participants. After that we conducted an AEIOU observation at the local farm initiative, Tri Cycle Farms. This research method refers to observing a space’s activity, environment, interaction, objects, and users. We learned a lot from this trip, but especially again that the community’s involvement in combatting food insecurity makes all the difference to the businesses and collectives who are working towards a brighter future with more food equity. Lastly in this research phase, our team attempted to coordinate two graffiti walls, or boards where people can freely write their thoughts and opinions in response to a prompt. While we were excited to see the results, it turned out that there was almost no reaction to this method. Even after the boards were hung up at a garden center and at one of the community gardens for four days, we received only a single response. While disappointing, this outcome actually allowed our team to again think about how the community interacts with this issue and what that would mean for our solutions phase. All of this research helped up to better understand food insecurity in the context of Fayetteville’s community and helped our team to once again revise our how might we question. Our final prompt was finally a question for which we could truly find workable solutions to: How might we increase the enthusiasm community members have about gardening?
Our potential solutions relied heavily on the notion that the community needed to be invigorated and educated before drastic changes would occur. In total, Anna-Faith, Lupe, and I drafted three solutions that could answer all of the questions brought up in our research. Solution one was a traveling greenhouse. This would be a versatile mobile garden program which would travel around to local schools, educating students on gardening and food insecurity while also hosting the ability to have growing plants onboard year-round. Our second solution would be a mentorship program where experienced gardeners or local farmers would be paired with new growers in order to encourage learning and improve the rate of gardeners who stick with the venture of growing their own food. Lastly, we devised a community hours program for high schools. This program would involve schools encouraging their students to volunteer time at local farms and gardens in order to receive community service hours on their transcripts. This not only would be a learning experience for the kids but would also be something they could put on college applications. All of these solutions were created with the idea that cultivating enthusiasm and appreciation, especially early on, for gardening will eventually lead to more community involvement in current programs that fight food insecurity and will hopefully add to the development of new ones!
As we concluded this project, our team took a step back to really absorb and process everything we had learned over the course of the semester. Our final understanding of this issue boiled down to one line: for the community, by the community. Gardening has the potential to be a sustainable and environmentally friendly way to combat local food insecurity. However, in order for community gardening to provide this service, community members themselves need to take the initiative by getting excited and getting involved!
Co-Creators: Anna-Faith Pearson and Lupe Albarrán