OL 303 Assignment Three Discussion
Vegetable Gardens & Community Gardens for Family Nutrition & Food Security
https://csd-i.org/vegetable-gardens-community-gardens-food/

Good morning.

This is going to be a very short discussion today because you have lots to do in preparation for your workshop.

In the very first workshop that you lead for five months ago using the 10 seed technique it was meant to be a purely participatory workshop. In other words you were facilitating the collection of information from your community without coloring it with your own voice.

From the needs that they voiced you developed a simple theory of change and a simple project outline. After a few weeks of fine tuning your project he returned to the community to get their feedback on what you had designed for them.

If you did your job well, the community should have felt that you were working on their project for them. If they liked the project that you returned with, they should by then have developed a sense of ownership; this was their project and you were simply supporting it.

Now, you’re beginning to make their project real. This week you are going to hold another workshop and exchange of information is going to be two way.

Giving Information
You are going to begin the process of providing them with tools and information and knowledge which they might not have had access to before. You going to be helping them to understand the importance of nutrition in their family, the importance of having access to food 12 months out of the year, and the opportunity that home gardens offers to them in solving these two challenges.

Collecting Information
But at the beginning of this workshop you’re also going to be asking them for real information in the form of three surveys. This isn’t so much participatory, this is data collection.

Exchanging Information
But you should make a workshop as participatory as possible by keeping the exchange of information as conversational as possible. If you bring up a fact about nutrition asked the participants what they think about that and if they have seen examples of that in their own community. If you bring up ideas for nutritious food that they can grow, ask them what they think about that and if they have other ideas. This’ll keep their sense of ownership in the project and also will give you new information that you might not have known yourself.

Ivy in Tanzania, has a project that sounds like it’s more pure nutrition than it is about home gardening – but I’m not absolutely clear on that. If that is the case Ivy can modify this week’s workshop to address proper nutritional care of children and proper eating. She could then modify the next few lessons to focus more on shopping for food, hygienic storage and preparation of food, and nutritious recipe planning that mothers could incorporate into their cooking.

Please send me photographs of your workshop!

I look forward to hearing about your results.

Please move on to Assignment Three Homework.