OL 303 Assignment Two Homework
Online Learning: OL 303 Vegetable Gardens & Community Gardens for Family Nutrition & Food Security
Center for Sustainable Development

https://csd-i.org/vegetable-gardens-community-gardens-food/

This week’s resources:
Assignment Two Discussion
CSDi Development Community & the Family Food Security Group
Magee Example Project Assignment Two
Download Class Docs 303
Useful Nutrition Charts for Workshops.doc
OL 303 Lesson Plan on Introducing Nutrition for Community.doc
OL 303 Specific Links; I’ve added several documents and links to books to this page

Links for the homework are at the bottom of this page

Assignment Two. Preparing for an introductory workshop on nutrition and for conducting a baseline survey.
Part one.
Part One: Learning About Nutrition

1. Skim the rest of the FAO Fact Sheets
2. Skim the book “Healthy Harvest” (it’s a beautiful book, nicely organized, and packed with useful information)
3. Look through “Useful Nutrition Charts for Workshops.doc”.

Part Two: Adapting a Lesson Plan
Download the Lesson Plan on nutrition. Read through it and adapt it to your region. For example there might be activities which aren’t culturally acceptable in your area. You might also be able to include some specific names of local foods.

I’m also giving you a set of charts in the Useful Nutrition Charts document that you can turn into how to cards or posters. One in particular will be very useful for the workshop as a large-scale poster. It’s the circular chart showing the different food types placed in pie shaped wedges. In the workshop you will write the names of foods that the participants brainstorm adjacent to the food group right onto the chart. Several of the other ones might be useful as posters or handouts. There is another one that’s for a good conceptually that shows “Current Mail, Better Meal”.

In planning for the workshop next week think about food: Several organizations use snacks and lunches in nutrition workshops as a way to demonstrate healthy meals. You might want to work with a nutritionist to develop a menu for two snacks and one luncheon, and then find some volunteers who can prepare and serve food since you’ll be busy leading workshop. Ideas for these menus can be found in the book “Healthy Harvest”.

Part Three: Conducting a Baseline Survey.
I’ve included three, one page rapid assessment surveys. One is on assessing food security, another is on assessing food diversity, and the third is about home gardening.

Print the three surveys out along with the document ‘FAO Innovative Tools for Assessing Household Food Security and Dietary Diversity’ and read them carefully so that you understand them. If you have questions or if you want to find out a deeper level of information I’ve also included two background documents that you can read, but they aren’t mandatory. They might be useful for understanding the scoring system.

You might want to modify the surveys to best fit your region. There may be questions that are culturally inappropriate, and you might be able to make the questions more interesting by using local names and words. Don’t forget to put the person’s name, the date, and the location at the top of each survey.

Each one of these single page surveys will take approximately 10 minutes to conduct. You’ll be working with one representative member from a family, so you will need to spend 30 minutes with that person if you do all three surveys. My suggestion would be to keep your workshop small — — say members of 12 families — — and have three colleagues accompany you to help with the surveys and to help with the workshop. That way four of you could interview 12 families in about 90 minutes. I would role-play the surveys with my three colleagues a few days before the workshop for practice and to uncover any problems.

The surveys are going to be very useful in week four and five in working with an agriculturalist and a nutritionist in determining which food crops will be most appropriate for your garden workshop.

RESOURCES
NUTRITION BOOKS:
Healthy Harvest: A training manual for community workers in good nutrition, and the growing, preparing and processing of healthy food. This is a very well done new book out of Zimbabwe.
http://motherchildnutrition.org/healthy-nutrition/pdf/mcn-healthy-harvest.pdf

The Sustainable Nutrition Manual: There is a very good information in this book. There is also a more comprehensive baseline study form that you can look at as a comparison to the rapid appraisal techniques that we are using for our baseline study.

Improving Nutrition through Home Gardening; a training package for preparing fieldworkers in Africa. This is an FA0 classic.
http://www.fao.org/3/X3996E/X3996E00.htm

NUTRITION WEBSITES:
FAO Family Nutrition Guide with 14 Fact Sheets. These will give you a snapshot and overview of human nutrition requirements. The sheet which I gave you last week “A Healthy Diet” was from this collection.
http://www.fao.org/ag/humannutrition/nutritioneducation/62758/en/  

NUTRITION DOCUMENTS: These can be downloaded from the Download Class Documents page
I’ve selected interesting charts and illustrations that can be used in your workshop and placed them in one document.
Useful Nutrition Charts for Workshops.doc

Lesson Plan for Introducing Nutrition for Community Members.

BASELINE STUDY DOCUMENTS:
Introduction:
FAO Innovative Tools for Assessing Household Food Security and Dietary Diversity

Nutrition:
FAO Dietary Diversity Questionnaire

FAO Guidelines for Measuring Household and Individual Dietary Diversity

Food Security:
Household Food Insecurity Access Scale Survey Questionnaire

USAID Household Food Insecurity Access Scale HFIAS

Home Gardening:
Home Gardening Questionnaire

The homework to turn in will be:
1. Confirmation that you’ve skimmed the book ‘Healthy Harvest’ and the FAO fact sheets.
2. Your revised lesson plan for the nutrition workshop.
3. If you’ve decided to make a how-to card please send an example that.
4. If you have made revisions to the surveys please send those as well.

Go to Magee’s Example Project Assignment Two and the Lesson Plan to see what this could look like.

See you next week.