Hi everyone! This week, our group was able to flesh out our idea further and solidify the foundation of our project. We collectively struggled with getting up to speed and ensuring we were all on the same page. Because of reading week and not being able to coordinate an in-person meeting for a while, our group felt a bit disorganized and had a moment of anxiety that we were behind schedule.
Overcoming Challenges & This Week's Session
However, after this session and putting our minds together to brainstorm interviewees and fully talk through our ideas and timeline, we left the session feeling accomplished and with next steps for ourselves. It was a rollercoaster of progress, but we had a group meeting before class, finalized our research question, decided on our additional media piece, and did some field work as a team. We were able to meet all of our goals for this session, which were to confirm our research question, delegate tasks, and confirm our first set of interviews!
Our research question as of now is: “How do/can community gardens in Regent Park contribute to food security and economic justice for marginalized residents, and what challenges do residents face in accessing these spaces?”
To acquaint our group with the neighbourhood, this past session, we went on a walk around the neighbourhood and observed people's personal gardens in their front lawns, gardening spaces such as the one near the St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church, and Saima and Zahra showed the group the empty area of land of what used to be Regent Park Duke of York Public School. Our audio recording for this week is a snippet of our conversation upon seeing that empty land as we discuss our observations and thoughts on what the future of it could look like.
Photos of vacant land previously a public school (left) and a community garden (right).
Our Project So Far
The format of our project will consist of the long-form piece of journalism, our podcast, and our additional media piece, which will be a seed book! Our idea with the seed book is to speak to our interviewees who will be residents and people involved with gardening in Regent Park, asking them about certain plants they prioritize in their gardens, learning about their cultural significance and what meals they prepare with them. Depending on the responses we will get, we hope to highlight the most significant plant/crops in the seed book with graphics, information about them, and the seeds themself.
We are also really excited to conduct our first two interviews in the coming week with people whom Saima and Zahra know as active gardeners in the community. Our first interview will be with Nadia Islam, whose family now commutes to Scarborough to garden, which will be an interesting topic to explore because there is a story about why someone would go across the city to garden. Our second interview will be with a father in Regent Park who still gardens outside of his old building, 259 Sumach, despite living in one of the newer buildings. We will speak to him about the challenges of accessing green spaces and what community gardens mean to him.
Looking Ahead
This week put us in a good place to continue our research and conduct interviews. Now we have to create interview questions, schedule a time at FOCUS recording space, and formalize a script for our podcast to run more smoothly. We are hoping to solidify at least 2 more interviews before the next session, begin working with literature on the impact of community gardens with economic justice, and get started on our seed book!
The Growing Regent Park team members are Lukas, Nicholas, Saima, Zahra, and Zhiyi.