main soc 420 hunger page
soc 315 hunger page

We have this week and most of next to make decisions--what do you want to do, what tasks are required to get it done, when can you devote time to it, etc. By Monday, I want to know what you're going to work on, and we'll begin getting into work groups and planning the next 2 weeks of the course. Here are some of the ideas that have been thrown out:

• Brainstorming about a Web site
  This is a major undertaking. At some point, the hunger project will not seem so exclusively part of Anthropology/Sociology. Dr. Powers will incorporate hunger as a theme into her Soc 327 in the spring. The goal is to build a student-owned, student run initiative, with faculty supervision, that does a few things:
  1. reduces the incidence of hunger locally;
  2. builds social capital (strengthens relationships between the university and the community, and relationships between the various individual and organizational actors that are involved in hunger relief);
  3. provides clearly defined roles for the university to work on hunger (there are already many committed people and organizations doing things--we need to define our role[s]);
  4. provides opportunities for students to fulfill cornerstone requirements--service learning, internships, research and yes, even international;
  5. serves as a clearinghouse for local information on hunger (activities, projects, contacts, relevant Web resources, etc.)
  6. There will be more . . .
  So the idea is that there is a lot of up-front work involved in planning, figuring out what a Web site could do, to what audiences it should be directed, how can it be most useful/usable, etc.
• Working on a web site-this obviously goes with the first, sort of. There would probably be credit hours for students interested in working on such a thing.
• Research on web-based, hunger-related links, possible funding sources--the idea would be to 'filter' the vast amounts of information on the web, find projects/initiatives that would be relevant to issues in La Grande; what can we learn from what's on the Web (in terms of practice, networking, statistics, etc.)? Whoever would like to work on this needs to get together--we need to give everyone road maps, figure out how time can be most efficiently used. One of the web pages would be a set of useful links for those interested in the project, which would be a product of this work. This can build on the set of links from Soc 315.

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• Awareness-raising campaign
  • Flyers, printed materials-for instance, make a list of most requested items-right now the food drive is going for tonnage--not even quantity--over quality. This is good because it will bring in more food. But could we improve on this strategy? What should we base this on? How to collect information? A couple of ideas--flyers for grocery stores, showing shoppers what items are most useful for the food banks, if they're in the mood and willing to contribute (these flyers could assume various forms--this would involve designing what they should look like, working with grocers, basing it on information, whether surveys, interviews with food bank workers, etc.); Another idea would be a sort of refrigerator 'cheat sheet'--it could also have most requested items, it could also have other information (hunger website, relevant phone numbers of food banks, other sources of food in town, etc.);
  • A cookbook-e.g., a '10 item' cookbook, for instance (recipes that can be made using only the most requested foods … ); recipes could come from a variety of sources--the people who use these foods, people at food banks, ideas from online sources (inquiries to people who maintain recipe web sites, for instance); this could be integrated in with an awareness-raising campaign among the grocery stores (what tasks involved?), an awareness-raising campaign for hunger in the community, etc. (facts, information about hunger in Oregon, the causes, the effects, etc.); There is the content of the cookbook, its design, distribution, etc. to consider--lots of work here.
  • Media campaign--there's newspapers, radio, public access on cable, etc. Plenty to work on, at the least developing a strategy for getting the word out on projects/initiatives, etc.
• Self-governance-What if recipients had more say over how food from food banks was distributed? Would there be interest? Would this perhaps address perceived problems about equity, waste, etc. What is people elected boards, established rules about how to distribute food (they know who needs it, who's abusing it, how particularistic it is, etc.)? We could design a survey assessing people's attitudes about self-governance, the possible benefits of greater self-governance. We would want to talk with Community Connections about gatekeepers, resistance to sharing control, etc.
• Changing patterns of consumption-What happens when the economy goes south, benefits are cut, services slashed? How do people cope? Do they change their consumption habits? This would be more research-oriented than some other ideas. Possible research methods could be to analyze sales data from groceries; talk to retail grocers; survey people going to food banks; other ideas?.
• Survey of people using food banks--could be a written survey, we could do interviews--there are multiple possibilities. Some types of information that might be useful--an item ranking (what are the most useful items--this would be critical to some of the other possible projects); economizing strategies (what do people do to stretch food, non-food items), perceived problems with the way food banks are run, people's knowledge of sources of aid locally, (again) attitudes on self-governance--would there be interest, receptivity to such a thing? etc.

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• University Food drive (how could we add value??). This would have to happen quickly--it's already going on. I'd want participants to do something more than just go door-to-door, so if you're interested in this, we need to get together and come up with a plan. Soon.
  • Some ideas for the food drive group: It seems like you've hit a brick wall or two in terms of getting the word out on the food drive. That's okay--it's a learning experience. Working with local radio stations, understanding they're generally profit driven and that public service announcements have to be short and sweet, or that personalities may influence how the word gets out, are important lessons. Here are some ideas:
  • There are six people in this group. Each needs to have a specific plan of what he/she is going to do. There are easily six different things you could work on, all valuable in the long run. One would be becoming an expert on this particular EOU food drive. How is it run, how is it publicized, who are the target participants, how successful has it been (do data over time exist), how is people's participation sought, how is collection/distribution organized, what strategies are used to increase collections (e.g., competitive), what arrangements made with food banks in town about distribution, etc.
  • If you're an expert on EOU's food drive, you can learn from comparison with other food drives. Another task would be to understand the role of the food drive in providing hunger relief for the community. This would entail talking to people at the food banks, to Carmen Gentry at Community Connections (who will be in class Monday Feb 24, by the way), and generally trying to understand how much of the food donated in town comes from food drives, who sponsors them, how are they run, where does the food go, what kinds of arrangements do the food banks have with people running food drives, etc. If the other sources of food, such as the USDA surplus commodities, are drying up (because the feds are buying back less surplus commodities these days and diverting money to other projects), then the food coming from food drives will become proportionally more important to the community. Essentially the development of social capital will have to compensate for diminishing sources of food coming from the federal government (which in the long run may be wise to lessen dependence on fickle federal politicians [FFP]).
  • Do some sociology research. It was also mentioned, in the stuff that Tad and Michelle discussed with Mary Brock, that there may be some gender differences among the residence halls with respect to participating in the food drive. What's going on? There were a few hypotheses in class today. One was that Hunt and Dorian(?) are doing things differently, that Dorian is separated and the male side isn't contributing much, they don't have a sense that they're competing for prizes or working together towards something. How can we explain the variation between residence halls, between the sexes? What sorts of methods of inquiry would help answer that question? You'd need to move quickly on this one--doing surveys and interview work aren't last-minute enterprises. Another idea was that the time of contact might be critical, and that getting hold of RAs, who are essentially the gatekeepers in this case, and finding the ones willing to participate, might be important. What are the different dynamics of the res halls, and how does this affect participation in the food drive? This would be a project for one person to work on, and there's certainly lots of sociology in it if someone is interested.
  • There is also an opportunity to do some Web-based research on food drives in other parts of the country. There must be some good information on how to do them, what works and what doesn't, etc. If someone wanted to take some of this research, distill it down into some important lessons/principles for running food drives, and compare it to what EOU is doing, that would be great as well. Make sure you check out the stuff on the course web page (under 'web links') about evaluating web sites--this needs to be done with a critical eye. If out of this class we could come up with some important lessons for food drives, and eventually students could serve as a resource that helped groups to do food drives more effectively, that would likely increase the amount of food donated. It may be a bandaid, but if there is an infrastrcture in place to run food drives or provide information on them, and to collect information on how important they are to the overall community strategy to combat hunger, this would be an invaluable contribution to the hunger project we're hoping to build at EOU. Hopefully you can begin to see how some of the projects could be integrated, such as the community awareness stuff we've talked about (the cookbook, the item list, the sheets for grocery stores, etc).
  • Someone could also work on a community survey. We probably wouldn't have time to administer it, but I could look for some money, and we could eventually do it, and there would probably be some 405 (reading and conference) credits for anyone who wanted to pursue this (and cornerstones as well). What would we want to know from the community? Attitudes about hunger? Willingness to participate in food drives? How often do people participate, do they have favorites, what do they know about the food banks in town, their willingness to volunteer, the income levels and ability to donate money or food, etc. Lots of stuff here, again useful and easy to integrate into the other initiatives.
  • Just a note--as you go through any of these ideas, it's important that you think sociologically. That's what we have to offer--different ways to look at what's being done, what might be effective and why, etc. The role of the university isn't just to provide cheap labor, but to provide some level of expertise, and to serve as an important educational tool for students. One of the key things that would be a long-term, sustainable impact that a project like this could have on the community would be to create/build/cultivate social capital--build networks between different indidivuals and groups, increase levels of trust among those participating in or receiving the fruits of these efforts, coordinating activities so that it's pretty clear who's doing what and when, and that there is as little duplication of effort, and that volunteer hours go as far as they can.

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• Survey of community members--What are people's attitudes about hunger, poverty locally? Is there a stigma? What can we do to not only raise awareness of local deprivation, but to increase people's acceptance of the importance of contributing and accepting those who need help, rather than perceiving them as somehow responsible for their situations. We wouldn't have time to administer such a survey, but we could design it, have it ready to go, and there would be soc 405 credits for people wanting to follow through on it.
• Putting together data collection/reporting mechanism (planning for a progress report)-how would we know the status of hunger in the community? This would be an ongoing thing, sort of a 'how is the project doing?' And a mechanism to measure its success over time.

We need to move

Other ideas are welcome, but have them quickly! Put some serious thought into what would you like to work on. We need to begin identifying projects, figuring out what tasks need to be accomplished, dividing labor, etc. Next week we'll begin planning--the up front work needs to be done before then.

Okay, most of you have checked in with methis week. That's good--keep on working. Here's what I'll expect--

1. by Monday (Feb 24), you've sent to me your plan of work. That is, what you've done, how you will be spending your week, what you plan to accomplish, and how it fits in with what the other members of your group are doing. Don't despair--much of this stuff you'll be able to tweak slightly and put into your papers.
2. The papers are individual assignments. Your grade on the hunger project is half participation, half paper. They're worth 100 points, so take them seriously, because I will. That doesn't mean they have to be long, but it does mean consider the context--this is a 400 level class, and I'll expect not only that you put some effort into it and document how you've spent your time and what you got out of it, but that some of that effort involved reflection, not just manual labor. Getting the participation points means documenting what you've done, and having something to show for that time. If you've spent 10-15 hours talking to people, searching the web, etc., I'll expect you'll have more than a half-page paper to show for it. Papers should be at least 4-5 pages long, and this is without filler.