Focusing efforts towards Lasting Impacts

By Alison Chi

This week, we met with our stakeholder Emma Sorrell for the second time. Before our meeting with Emma, we collaborated on a Google doc, throwing down every idea we had that our SAR team could work on for the next two quarters. These ideas ranged from creating public service announcements (PSAs), doing extensive demographic surveys and research, and looking into getting a biodigester for all the food waste in dining halls. During our meeting, we realized that we were split between two potential routes: education for consumers, who are the students and staff that eat in the dining halls, and re-directing how food waste is managed on the production and backend. It was unanimously agreed upon that focusing our efforts in educating dining attendees would leave a lasting impact on significantly reducing food waste.

Since we had a lot of varied ideas on how to tackle education, Emma steered us in the right direction by reminding us that we need to focus our efforts on the project that will grab people’s attention the most — one that will have the most impact. After our stakeholder meeting, we had our team meeting, where we decided which of our ideas we should focus on and how we should tweak our project ideas.

Besides all that, our food waste team also wanted to do some events to help us bond as a team. Since we are all very busy college students, it was hard for us to pin down a date that all of us were free in the foreseeable future. More updates on that coming soon but we will be doing some team bonding festivities!