Over the course of our Action Project, I learned many new skills and had experiences that enriched my learning and outlook on the topic of food insecurity. Each group member was tasked with contacting local restaurants and grocery stores to inquire about excess food that could be donated to local shelters that would otherwise be thrown out. In retrospect, I… Read more »
My action project group was the public health group. Personally, I chose this action project group because public health type work is almost the polar opposite of what I do on a day to day basis. However, despite starting the project with the mindset that my action project group would be challenging, I don’t think I was prepared for just… Read more »
This project was one of my first experiences planning an event for a large group of people. I learned just how many moving parts needed to be organized in order for everything to go according to plan. Unfortunately, after all of our planning we had to cancel the event because our venue pulled out. The big lesson we learned was… Read more »
Through our group action project, I learned that individual strengths can lead to divisions of labor that are sometimes hard to equalize. I feel this way because I realized that my shortcomings as an organizer and the limits of my time resulted in a less equal contribution than I would have normally expected of myself. I tried to make up… Read more »
What is food and how is it part of a larger system? This is the question that we have been learning about all quarter long and what my action project group decided to explore through food waste. Before I took on this project food as waste was merely the cuisine that I was unable to finish at the dinner table. I had… Read more »
Hunger has been a prevalent topic in this course. Over the last 10 weeks we’ve seen plenty of examples of how hunger effects people across the world (The hungry planet, Kenyan farmers eating grasshoppers in off seasons, King Corn, etc.) World hunger is a big problem and initially our group wasn’t sure how the 6 of us were supposed to… Read more »
Up until this quarter, I had never taken a class that forced students to step outside of the classroom to complete an action project instead of simply writing about it. Many times, we are tasked with finding possible solutions that addresses one of the many problems that are occurring within our community. Yet, the reality is that implementing these solutions… Read more »
This action project was a learning experience for me and for my group. We began with the intention of affecting direct policy change through legislation aimed at legalizing hemp nationwide, but soon had to redirect our efforts after our first avenue ended up being impractical during the time period we were allocated. We chose hemp legalization as our issue of… Read more »
Writing my final paper was a very useful and reflective experience for me, and it is one of the few “final assignments” that I have actually really enjoyed. For some background, my group was working with issues of food accessibility and we decided to interview University of Washington professors whose work was relevant to or intersected with that topic. We… Read more »
Contemplative practices, as trivial as they may seem to others, have the power to inform in an interactive manner as well as generate thoughts about one’s role within regard to the rest of the food system. I personally have found our contemplative practices thus far to be very engaging and necessary. With an act as simple as being told to… Read more »