CitySeed: Design Brigade Week 3
Overview
This week, our team continued to develop our research in the topics discussed in last week’s post and began to apply that information to the context of New Haven’s food system. In the process, we conducted an interview with Gather New Haven’s Garden Education Coordinator Esther Rose-Wilen along with two of the current Growing Entrepreneurs, as well as Director of Art Integration Marissa Mead from Atelier Cue and Svigals + Partners. With the insights gained in the interviews, we focused our efforts on crafting surveys, flyers, and posters in order to further understand the relationships between New Haven stakeholders and food. With those outreach tools in hand, we took to the New Haven Green on Saturday to hear from local community members that frequent the park, the neighboring bus stop, the civic center of New Haven, and the International Festival of Arts & Ideas.
Interview Takeaways
Last week’s discussion with Esther and the Growing Entrepreneurs enhanced our understanding of the role of outreach and education within the context of food justice. For example:
- A great deal of the production of produce is seemingly complex to those who are unfamiliar with the processes through which produce is grown
- Organizations with educational programs, like Gather, have compounding impacts on younger generations of growers who pique interest in people that are often most disenfranchised
- Collaboration between organizations is a cost-effective way to achieve specific goals within the food system
Some further questions that arose after this visit were:
- How can educational programming make its way into the market?
- How can the food system at the market be more transparent and easily legible?
- How can collaboration between organizations fit into the existing landscape of events at the market?
After hearing from Gather, we spoke with Marissa Mead. Her work demonstrated effective methods of community engagement and gave us a clear idea about how empathetic listening translates to an appropriately designed product. Our workshop with her also gave us an opportunity to refine our surveys prior to the research and listening session on the Green.
Saturday at The Green
In order to get a better understanding of how and why people engage with the market, we went out into New Haven to ask them about their experiences.
What neighborhood do you live in?
Do you regularly shop at the New Haven farmers’ market?
If yes, why do you come?
If not, why don’t you?
The formal surveying took place primarily on the Green adjacent to a major avenue of foot traffic created as a result of nearby bus stops on Temple Street, booths from organizations set up at the International Festival of Arts and Ideas, and the convergence of the park sidewalks. This location allowed us to talk to people that resided in the many neighborhoods outside of walking distance from the farmers’ markets, as did the flyers we posted around New Haven.
This initial outreach is preliminary, but did provide the following information:
- Of those who responded that they attend the market, the predominant reasons were access to fresh and/or local food, the atmosphere of the market, and unique products
- Of those who responded that they do not attend the market, the predominant reasons were an unawareness of the markets’ location, an unawareness of the markets’ existence, the prices being considered too high, and the markets being too far away
Next Steps
In the following week, we plan to continue surveying the New Haven community to better understand the issues at hand and continue developing our research for the midpoint presentation and client meeting with CitySeed this following Friday. We will also be visiting a farm that regularly sells at the Wooster Square Market to better understand their experiences in the farmers’ market system.
