Course:LFS350/Projects/2014W1/T22/Proposal
Version Control
The need to amend and change the project charter will inevitably be present. These changes should be well communicated between all project stakeholders and documented with a version control chart.
| Version | Author | Role | Changes | Date |
| 1.9.0 | Michael Zhang | Success Factors | 1. Recommendations for possible vendors will not be considered as a success factor, but it will be a goal
2. Removed recommendations for substitutions |
November 1st, 2014 |
| 1.8.0 | Xiaoyi Zhang | Stakeholder's Summary | Included UBC as one of stakeholders | October 31th, 2014 |
| 1.7.0 | Kristy Yee | Communication Plan/Progress Report | Included a Progress Report on Discussions page for weekly updates | October 29th, 2014 |
| 1.6.0 | Sheldon Tay | Deliverables/Stakeholder's Summary | Removed: “Determine alternative food options” in Deliverables
Removed: "Provide suggestions to alternate foods if local purchasing is not possible" in Stakeholder's Summary |
October 29th, 2014 |
| 1.5.0 | Sheldon Tay | Background Summary | Connected CCC Project with our proposal
Shorted "Sustainable Food" definition while following City of Vancouver criterias Reorganized content Rid last sentence |
October 23rd, 2014 |
| 1.4.0 | Danielle Sanders | Methods | Removed: “Use of invoices, velocity reports, and receipts provided by the Carnegie Community Center to determine costs of food”
Added: “Use only velocity reports provided by the Carnegie Community Center to determine costs and origins of food” |
October 21st, 2014 |
| 1.3.0 | Lisa Flescher | Purpose |
Added a main research question (“How sustainable is the current Carnegie Community Center's Food Procurement Program?”) Removed: “Purpose is to [...] increase local food purchases” Added: “Purpose is to develop a baseline assessment for Carnegie Community Center to help assess their level of sustainability” |
October 14th, 2014 |
| 1.2.0 | Kristy Yee | Deliverables | Added: This project will look at the second quarter of 2013.
Removed: “What is the Total % of Local/Sustainable Foods purchased by Carnegie in 1 Year” Added: “What is the Total % of Local/Sustainable Foods purchased by Carnegie in the 2nd Quarter of 2013” |
October 10th, 2014 |
| 1.1.0 | Michael Zhang | Deliverables | Removed: “What is the proportion of local/sustainable within each of the Top 8 Foods”
Added: “What is the Total % of Local/Sustainable Foods purchased by Carnegie in 1 Year” |
October 1st, 2014 |
| 1.0.0 | Everyone | Initial version | September 29th, 2014 |
Project Background
In 2014, the City of Vancouver decided that the production and consumption of local and sustainable food was a priority for the City of Vancouver as reflected in both the Greenest City Action Plan and the Vancouver Food Strategy. As a food purchaser, the City can play a role in encouraging local and sustainable food through its own procurement practices. The City purchases about $5 million of food from 400 unique vendors every year (Craig, 2014). Where and how this money is spent can have major impacts on jobs, the environment, viability of enterprises and even the health and well-being of entire communities.
A study cited by a recent City of Vancouver report states that “buying from a BC office supply company resulted in 77 to 100 % more local economic activity, and provided twice as many jobs within the province, when compared to buying from a multinational office supply company” (Duffy 2013). As well, sourcing local producers can increase levels of food security while reducing the amount of GHG emissions due to decreased transportation distances, while the purchase of sustainable food can reduce the amount of GHG emissions due to decreased levels of petroleum based fertilizers or reduced amounts of packaging and processing.
As a result, the City launched a campaign to increase the percentage of food procured to be “local” and “sustainable. Local food was defined as: “(a) raised or grown or produced or processed within a 325 km radius of Vancouver; or (b) grown and transported in a way which has no more of an environmental impact than (a).” Sustainable food was defined within the City of Vancouver Local and Sustainable Food Procurement project outline as essentially foods certified by various trusted food agencies as sustainable.(Craig, 2014):
As part of the Local and Sustainable Food Procurement project, making local, sustainable food available in City and Parks facilities is in alignment with three key City documents: the Greenest City Action Plan, the Vancouver Food Strategy, and the Park Board Local Food Action Plan, (Craig, 2014) whose goals include:
- Making local food more available in community centres,
- Using the city’s purchasing power to buy sustainable, locally produced food, and
- Increase locally-sourced, higher-nutrition, and sustainably-packaged food sold and processed in Park Board system through collaboration, procurement rules, permits and licensing, and other tools.
The Carnegie Community Centre (CCC) at present is one out of three City run kitchens, and produces the largest amount in terms volume, with everything made from scratch. They operate 7 days a week from 9am to 11pm, and is a non-profit kitchen, that generally does not break even. They offer all of their services free, besides for a $1 annual membership fee, and offer heavily subsidised meals. For lunch they serve an average of 240 portions, and approximately 160 for dinner and are often the host of almost all local events, such as town hall meetings, luncheons with chief of police, art and culture events, all of these include some form of food component that they provide.
The CCC sources its food purchases from various assorted vendors with one major vendor (Yen Brothers). CCC has also identified the following goals for the Local and Sustainable Food Procurement project:
- Identify the % of local food purchases given the defined criteria from the City of Vancouver
- Increase % of local sustainable foods purchased
- Determine strategies to increase % of local sustainable foods or alternatives
The goal of our project is to establish a baseline assessment for CCC. These results will create a foundation for CCC to develop future projects and initiatives to help them achieve their goals for the Local and Sustainable Food Procurement project.
Stakeholder Summary
| Name, Role & Organization | Responsibilities |
| Student Team Members |
|
University of British Columbia (UBC)
|
|
Community Partner (CP)
|
|
Purpose and Research Question
The purpose of this project is to establish a baseline assessment of the sustainability at the Carnegie Community Centre’s Food Procurement Program. We will collect data on all the foods purchased in the second quarter of 2013 and find the percentage of how much of that food is considered local. Given this information we will determine the Top 8 foods purchased (based on the proportions from their budget) and identify methods to increase the percentage of local within each of the Top 8 Foods.
Main Research Question: How sustainable is the current Carnegie Community Centre Food Procurement Program?
To determined the above, we will look at the following:
- What is the total percentage of local foods purchased in the second quarter of 2013?
- What are the Top 8 foods purchased based on proportion of budget in the second quarter of 2013.
- Of these top 8 foods, what percentage of each food item is purchased locally?
- How can we make more of the purchases of each food item local or sustainable?
Methods
Our project will involve qualitative data collection and data analysis. While a mixed methods approach, including quantitative and qualitative data collection often provides a fuller ‘answer’ to a research question (Creswell, 2013), the concerns and interests of our community partner are better served by a strictly quantitative data focus.
As discussed in the purpose section of this proposal, our community partner is interested in determining the current situation of their food purchasing practices. While they have the information, they lack the time and personnel to do an analysis of how sustainable are the current food purchases of Carnegie Community Centre. Taking a pragmatic research approach to this question (Creswell, 2013) we determined our methods by considering not only what the community partner was asking but also how the information is likely to be used. Typically change is more easily accepted and initiated when the reasons for change are supported by numbers, especially when dealing with buying and purchasing habits. Thus most of our data collection will be examining current spending allocations. This will involved obtaining velocity reports (also known as purchase reports) from all the different vendors Carnegie has purchased from over a year time frame, and entering this information into a spreadsheet. This will require cooperation with Steven Mckinley, Kitchen Coordinator to provide the group with insights and information regarding kitchen operations, kitchen budget, and kitchen purchases. From our compiled spreadsheet we will be determining two things.
First Stage
Firstly we will examine the total spending of Carnegie kitchen in a year. As the City of Vancouver has encouraged the increase of local food purchases by its community institutions, we plan to calculate the percent of yearly food purchases that are obtained from local producers. Local is defined as produced and processed with in a 325 km radius from Vancouver City Centre (City of Vancouver, 2014). This way our community partner will have something that they can report to the city and use the information beyond our project.
Second Stage
The second portion of analysis will involve looking at which foods consume the greatest percentage of the kitchen budget. We will focus on the top 8 foods that consume the greatest percentage of the food budget, and determine what percentage of each food item are purchased from local vendors. Depending on the information provided by the original velocity reports, we may have to contact vendors to determining where foods are produced, processed and/or distributed locally, and if so, to what degree. If we are unable to obtain that information due to time or lack of communication we will classify that food item as “unknown locality” and thereby exclude it from our percentage calculation. Any exclusions of data from our calculations due to lack of information will be communicated to our community partner.
Third Stage
The final stage of the project will focus on the feasibility of increasing the total the percentage of local purchases in the previously identified top 8 foods. Increasing local purchases could include increasing volume of purchases from specific vendors, changing vendors, or splitting purchases between vendors. This will involve researching different, local vendors in the area, using Carnegie Hall as a centre point, and contacting these vendors to determine cost of the product of interest, as well as the capacity the vendor has to provide for Carnegie. If there are no local or organic options available for a specific product we may suggests a food item that is nutritionally similar that can also be acquired from local sources.
Challenges
Challenges we may face during our data collection could include missing or lack of data regarding purchases and/or costs of food items. The variety of possible alternative distributors may be overwhelmingly extensive, thereby consuming a lot of time to research the locality of a specific product within each available company. Alternatively the variety of distributors could be disappointingly limited, thus resulting in a lack of options to share with our community partner. When contacting businesses and companies we may be faced with non-response or ineffectual responses. That being said, the advantage of our research methodology is that it is quite straightforward as it involves a lot of numbers and calculations.
As we conduct our research we want to keep the community partner and community members in mind. Given the socio-economic nature of the neighbourhood and the tight budget of the kitchen, cost may be the greatest barrier to purchasing more local, sustainable and/or organic foods. Thus, ethically we must consider the costs variance of using a different vendor with more local products. To include this consideration in our final report we will propose alternative local vendors to our community partner highlighting the difference in cost of switching vendors. We may be able to propose trade offs or different options. For example, if Vendor A provided apples from 5 km away at $5/lb but Vendor B provided apples from 100 km away at $3/lb and their current vendor provided non-local apples at $2/lb we could propose a number of options that could map about the effects of choosing Vendor A, Vendor B or a combination of all three. This way the community partner can make a choice to switch vendors, or not, based on what factors - locality, price, etc - are most pertinent to their long term goals.
Deliverables
The deliverables for the project will include:
- The proposal presentation which will outline the goals and methodology for our project. During the term, we will make revisions to our project proposal. The final report will include the project objectives, background information about the community partner, data collected, analysis, and conclusion about the project.
- A Baseline assessment report detailing the amount of food procured by them that is considered local and sustainable. This report includes:
- Top 8 Foods that Carnegie Community Center spends the largest % of their food budget
What is the the % of local/sustainable from each of the Top 8
- A Recommendation section to:
- Identify vendors/suppliers that can source the Top 8 Foods in a local/sustaina
Success Factors/Criteria
Our success factor is measured by the ability to deliver a baseline assessment report for decision makers at Carnegie Community Centre. This will encompass a list of their top eight foods, which they spend the largest portion of their budget on, and provide a list of more local or sustainable and economically feasible alternatives to the top eight foods in accordance with the City of Vancouver’s goals and definitions of local and sustainable. If successdful, we hope to also provide recommendations of available vendors that can provide local/sustainable sources of food; however this will not be used to measure our success. If a more local or sustainable source cannot be found at a reasonable price, then an alternative food will be suggested with similar or better nutritional value at around the same price point. This would provide Carnegie Community Centre with an opportunity to plan strategies with the City of Vancouver and maximize the power of their budget for the provision of healthy and nutritious food to the impoverished people of the Downtown Eastside and surrounding areas while supporting the local economy. Whether the Carnegie Community Centre uses our suggestions is their prerogative and the adoption of our suggestions will not be considered as a success factor.
Communication Plan
| Action Item | Deliverable | Dates | Accountable |
| Weekly Updates | Progress Report (bullet points) | Ongoing | Each group member accountable; community partner to be involved |
| Group Meeting Attendance (in person where possible) | Meeting Agenda | Wednesday (Weekly Basis) | Each group member to give suitable input |
| Information sharing as it becomes available | Project Specific Information | Ongoing | All stakeholders to provide information in a timely manner and to provide prior and reasonable notice of dates when they will be unavailable |
Milestones
| Milestone | Event or Deliverable | Target Date | Responsibility |
| Milestone1 | Contact with the Community Partner via email | Thursday, Sep. 11 | Danielle Sanders |
| Milestone 2 | Visit to the Carnegie Community Centre | Wednesday, Sep. 4 | All group 22 members to contribute |
| Milestone 3 | Project Charter and Proposal Presentation | Wednesday, Oct. 1 | All group 22 members to contribute |
| Milestone 4 | Written Project Charter and Proposal | Saturday, Oct. 4 | All group 22 members to contribute; Michael Zhang to upload on Wiki |
| Milestone 5 | Revised Project Charter and Proposal | Saturday, Nov. 1 | All group 22 members to contribute; Community Partner to approve |
| Milestone 6 | Completion of Stage 1 | Wednesday, Nov. 5 | All group 22 members to contribute; Community partner (Steven Mckinley, kitchen coordinator) to provide information needed |
| Milestone 7 | Completion of Stage 2 | Wednesday, Nov. 12 | All group 22 members to contribute |
| Milestone 8 | Completion of Final Stage | Saturday, Nov. 22 | All group 22 members to contribute |
| Milestone 9 | Final Presentation | Wednesday, Nov. 26 | All group 22 members to contribute |
| Milestone 10 | Final Report | Wednesday, Dec. 3 | All group 22 members to contribute |
Approvals
The following individuals hereby approve this Project Charter:
| Role or Title | Name and Signature | Date |
| Data Analysis | Stephanie Chen | Oct. 4 |
| Editing | Lisa Flesher | Oct. 4 |
| Deliverables | Karyn Liu | Oct. 4 |
| Communications | Danielle Sanders | Nov. 1 |
| Technology | Sheldon Tay | Nov. 1 |
| Presentation Design | Kristy Yee | Nov. 1 |
| Wiki Editor | Michael Zhang | Nov. 1 |
| Group Planning | Xiaoyi Zhang | Nov. 1 |
References
Craig, K. (2014). Local & Sustainable Procurement in City Facilities Sustainability Support Services Report. Vancouver: City of Vancouver.
City of Vancouver Internal Working Group. (2014). Local & Sustainable Food Procurement Project Summary and Recommendations. Vancouver: City of Vancouver.
City of Vancouver. (2014). Defining COV’s Approach to Local and Sustainable Food Procurement. Vancouver: City of Vancouver
Creswell, J. W. (2003). Research design: qualitative, quantitative, and mixed method approaches. Thousand Oaks, Calif.: Sage Publications. (pp. 3-23)
Duffy, R. a. (2013). Buying Local: Tools for Forward-Thinking Institutions. Vancouver: Columbia Institute, LOCO BC, ISIS Research Centre at the Sauder School of Business