This week the Green Committee met for another wonderful discussion about our final project for our Regent Park Participatory Research Class. Moving along with our collective conversation around the idea of green spaces within Regent Park, we furthered our discussion this week to develop a project concept and to help answer the who, what, why, when, how of our project. In other words, how can we integrate our thought process and transform it into a community engagement project?
Our initial idea surrounded the hosting of an event in collaboration with other Regent Park organizations to sort of replicate an event held last week within the community which involved seed swapping. Unfortunately, our group recognized that the scope of the project is a bit limited due to the lack of extensive time to book, coordinate, advertise, and host such an event. We subsequently continued our discussion on other community engagement options that can be of use to our Green Committee group. We asked the question, “How can we do this?”- interviews? Sticky notes? or visual mapping diagrams?
This brought all of us to a questioning period where we developed a set of guiding research questions that included: “What does green space mean to you?”, “Do you have access to green space?”, and “What are some of the barriers to green space within your community?”. We were also provided with anecdotal stories of green space use and barriers to these common spaces by members of our group which further enriched our discussion and thematic questions involving green spaces. We then set out this week to gather information and answer the research questions presented above. It is kind of like taking on a three pronged approach with how we develop and implement our activity- preliminary analysis, reporting on our findings, and then creation of a design/community engagement intervention.
With that being said, our group was also able to look to different organizations and events to gather some inspiration. For example, we looked at 8 80 Cities, a Toronto community engagement specialist, to see how they create their boards for information collection. We agreed that they have a really great approach to community engagement and we look forward to utilizing their toolkits available to us via their website: see media attached. In addition, our colleague Julie also took us to an event where we were able to meet other community champions and indulge in conversation that helped to add more specificity to our engagement piece. We have concluded that for our idea, we will be creating a type of poster design, information campaign but will solidify this idea at this week’s workshop!
So far, we have been provided with great supportive resources from both our Professor and FOCUS Media group and we look forward to our workshop next week.
8 80 Cities- a leader in community engagement- https://www.880cities.org/
The Green Committee members are Julie, Shameel, Issac, and Mishika