Finding Our Direction: The Process of Building a Community-University Food Mapping Team

Abstract

Multifaceted causes and consequences of food insecurity require collaborative work across multiple academic disciplines and with various community partners in order to build sustainable solutions. Interdisciplinary teams require thoughtful considerations of time devoted to team-building exercises, paying particular attention to understanding members’ values. Teams must find points of convergence, develop mutually agreed upon common language, and openly discuss needs and expectations. This paper describes the process of building a community-university Food Mapping Team to address food security. The FMT initiative allows for a well-coordinated exploration of data collection methods that capitalize on the diverse interdisciplinary expertise and resources of university researchers and extensive knowledge of community partners, whose work can inform, and be impacted by, these efforts. We provide a set of processes used to form our partnership and describe our decision-making process in the development of a community food security research project. We also include a self-assessment of the research planning and implementation process that our team used and describe areas of improvement for other community-university groups to consider.