Finding Our Direction: The Process of Building a Community-University Food Mapping Team

Abstract

Multifaceted causes and consequences of food insecurity require collaborative work across multiple academic disciplines and with various community partners in order to build sustainable solutions. Interdisciplinary teams require thoughtful considerations of time devoted to team-building exercises, paying particular attention to understanding members’ values. Teams must find points of convergence, develop mutually agreed upon common language, and openly discuss needs and expectations. This paper describes the process of building a community-university Food Mapping Team to address food security. The FMT initiative allows for a well-coordinated exploration of data collection methods that capitalize on the diverse interdisciplinary expertise and resources of university researchers and extensive knowledge of community partners, whose work can inform, and be impacted by, these efforts. We provide a set of processes used to form our partnership and describe our decision-making process in the development of a community food security research project. We also include a self-assessment of the research planning and implementation process that our team used and describe areas of improvement for other community-university groups to consider.

Engineering Education in Support of Urban Gardening

“…However, food insecurity and other challenges that urban gardens respond to are inherently complex. Therefore, teams comprised of members with varying academic and social backgrounds can maximize the social and technical benefits gained from urban garden university partnerships for both parties [5]. While dedicating time to interpersonal and social interactions are an important part of developing relationships with urban gardens, focusing solely on these aspects would be dismissive of the opportunity to expand upon technical components.…”