Community Research Project Overview

After five years partnering with McMaster University, we went off campus to see its students and faculty tackle real community problems. This piece follows the Office of Community Engagement’s initiative on Hamilton food insecurity, led by anthropology chair Tina Moffat and her students.


Client

McMaster University

Industry

Education, Non-Profit Organization

Type

Documentary

Platform

Web & Social Media

Audience

Students, Faculty, Community stakeholders

About this project

Double Barrel Studios has proudly been partnering with McMaster University and it’s range of faculties for over five years. Last year, we had the opportunity to go off campus and see how McMaster’s students and professors continue to apply their resourcefulness and ingenuity in our community.

McMaster’s Office of Community Engagement lead an initiative in order to address food insecurity issues in Hamilton. Associate Professor & Chair of McMasters Department of Anthropology, Tina Moffat, was at the front line of these studies, sparking conversations with students to brainstorm ideas and advocate for food security on and off campus.

After listening to the concerns and understanding the need for change, the McMaster student researchers really wanted to get involved in finding ways to volunteer and help people in their community access the necessary resources. That was when they partnered with Neighbour to Neighbour and the Hamilton Community Food Centre in order to discover best practises for evaluation of their program and to help uncover important issues from speaking with the community members.

This was a fun project for us to produce! We worked closely with the Office of Community Engagement Manager, Dave Heidebrecht, to tell three incredible stories of McMaster’s involvement with our city. McMaster University truly takes pride in their home town and they recognize the critical need for maintaining that relationship with the community.

Stay tuned for more!

Thank you for your tremendous work on this project. The videos both turned out amazing. It was an enjoyable experience from beginning to end. A big thanks to you and all of your team for the outstanding work.

Susan Emigh
Director, Public Relations, McMaster Faculty of Health Sciences

Public Relations | Community Food Centre | Client: McMaster Office of Community Engagement Transcript

I always call here as my second home. We learn together, do together, make food together. That's why I, for me, I enjoy, I love it and I learn every day. My name is Claire Wagner and I'm Director of Community Food at Neighbor2Neighbor. The Community Food Centre movement is really about acknowledging that food insecurity and poverty are systemic.

These are issues that only one individual person cannot fix or remedy. So at Neighbor2Neighbor, we're here working to try to support folks who are dealing with these challenges and helping to be sure that they have a space that they can feel safe and confident and empowered in their community. The Hamilton Community Food Centre wanted to know about best practices for evaluation of their program.

June Park and I set up a series of interviews with staff and community participants who were using the centre. Afterwards, we would go back to McMaster, see what they had to say, transcribe the interviews, and that gives us a better understanding of what issues are most relevant or important to the community members. So we created a dialogue between the community members and the staff so that they could hear each other.

That proved to be, I think, very beneficial to the centre. In terms of partnering with McMaster, we really see this as the beginning. We're brand new and we want many more people to get involved with us and really continue to grow the community around food and grow the food community in Hamilton. By engaging with community, we are getting that opportunity to do research that matters, to do research that will hopefully improve the human condition. That's what we're working towards. That's what we're working towards.

Public Relations | Community Food Centre | Client: McMaster Office of Community Engagement
Public Relations | Community Food Centre | Client: McMaster Office of Community Engagement

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