Performing Department
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Non Technical Summary
This project will work towards the goal of enabling Hawaii's small and beginning producers, processors, and wholesalers to enhance the safety of their food products (including complying with FSMA regulations), while maintaining profitability, sustainability, and equity. Activities will help to build the capacity of our local food system to disseminate best practices through robust knowledge sharing networks and culturally-tailored outreach strategies. Project obectives include:• Assess the specific food safety training needs, learning preferences, and knowledge sharing networks of Hawaii's ethnically diverse, small and beginning farmers, processors, and wholesalers.• Develop a community-based, FSMA-consistent food safety curriculum and pilot its delivery to 80 individuals through on-farm training sessions facilitating peer networking and knowledge exchange.• Disseminate 5 new food safety education/training materials and culturally-tailored delivery methodology to 10 local stakeholder organizations and 300 individuals for broader implementation throughout Hawaii.The project will be lead by Kokua Kalihi Valley (KKV), a community-based and culturally competent organization with vast experience in public health, community navigation, and participatory methodologies. Project Director Sharon Odom has been fostering a more vibrant local neighborhood food system for the past five years, including the development of a food hub currently involving 19 participants. Advising and technical assistance will be provided by a Project Consultant with a degree in Food and Agricultural law and expertise in food safety, food sovereignty, and their application in tribal communities. Collaborative involvement of a local Extension Agent will ensure that project activities are coordinated with agricultural extension efforts of the University of Hawaii system.
Animal Health Component
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Research Effort Categories
Basic
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Applied
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Developmental
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Goals / Objectives
Project Goals - Kokua Kalihi Valley (KKV) Hawaii Roots Food Safety Outrach Project will work towards the goal of enabling Hawaii's small and beginning producers, processors, and wholesalers to enhance the safety of their food products (including complying with FSMA regulations), while maintaining profitabiity, sustainability, and equity. Additionally, project activities will help to build the long-term capacity of our local food system to disseminate best practices through robust knowledge sharing networks and culturally-tailored outreach strategies.ObjectivesAssess the specific food safety education/training needs, learning preferences, and knowledge sharing networks of Hawaii`s ethnically diverse, small and beginning farmers, processors, and wholesalers.Develop a community-based, FSMA-consistent food safety curriculum and pilot its delivery to 80 individuals through on-farm training sessions facilitating peer networking and knowledge sharing.Disseminate 5 new food safety education/training materials and delivery methodology to 10 local stakeholder organizations and 300 individuals for broader implementation throughout Hawaii.
Project Methods
MethodsStakeholder Involvement - KKV will be accountable to diverse groups of stakeholdrs for this project, beginning first and foremost with our target audience of Hawaii's ethnically diverse, small and beginning farmers, processors and wholesalers. In order to develop effective, culturally-tailored knowledge dissemination strategies that have a far-reaching impact, this project will begin with an assessment of the target audience's food safety education/training needs, learning preferences, and knowledge sharing networks. Methodology will include individual/group interviews and a survey of growers, which are to be designed and implemented by collaborating CTAHR Extension Agent Fred Reppun. Mr. Repun has committed to a collaborative role in the project in order to align activities with on-going food safety extension activities of the University of Hawaii system. Additionally, Mr Reppun will work with KKV's Mobile Market Manager to survely local food retailers (e.g. grocery stores, retaurants, farmers markets) in order to understand the market forces impacting food safety issues faced by our target audience and invite participation from retail stakeholders in this project.KKV will host a gathering of its food hub that will be open to the public in order to announce the project and facilitate dialogue of target audience needs, social networks, and learning preferences. This event will also serve as a way to initiate input and participation form other stakeholders throughout the life of the project, including local farmers unions and associations, consumers in our community, and Hawaii enforcement agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and Department of Health. A particularly strong source for target audience engagement are KKV's 19 food hub vendors supplying our cafe, catering, and farmers market operations. These are all small and/or beginning businesses run by individuals from a range of educational levels and ethnicities, including indigenous Native Hawaiians and other Asian/Pacific Islander immigrants. Included in this group are many produce farmers utilizing organic agricultural systems and providing access to culturally-important foods, processors of local value-added products, and suppliers of local eggs, fish, beef, and venison. KKV's close relationships and regular contact with its food hub vendors will provide access to a reliable sample target audience that can be engaged on an on-going basis to provide valuable qualitative feedback during all all needs assesment, planning, implementation, and evaluation phases of the project. This project's participatory process will also be ensured through the reporting of needs assessment results back to stakeholders, soliciting coments on the outline of the new curriculum, and incorporating feedback from participants of pilot food safety training/networking sessins into curriculum modifications on and on-going basis.Proposed Activities and Techniques - Project activities will focus on developing a comunity-based, FSMA-consistent food safety curriculum and piloting it through four training sessions emphasizing culturally-tailored strategies for faciltating dialogue, peer networking and knowledge exchange around food safety.Recent studies have found that farmers consider social and exeriential learning pathways to be more useful than formal approaches and traditional extension activities involving one-way transfer of knowledge from experts/universities to pracitioners (Hoffman e al., 2015). Growers value information shared interpersonally by their peers, prefer learning grounded in practical experience (and thatis preferably on-going), and develop knowledge through specific application of principles rather than being provided with uniform concepts and generalizations (Wood et al., 2014). As a result, delivery of customized food safety curriculum through a networked approach is promising and this project's methodolgoy will emphasize the following areas:Understanding knowledge sharing networks among the target audience, including who/where to go for information, and potential strategies for activating individuals who have a high number of networking/knowledge sharing relationships (e.g. train-the-trainer, engaging early adopters, incentivizing sharing knowledge with peers.)Creating spaces and opportunities for relationship-building and peer exchange that are culturally appropriate and responsive to the social learning preferences of the target audience. In Hawaii, this may mean following cultural protocols to introduce ourselves to one another and open and close any training/networking sessions, sharing food and stories in an informal family-friendly atmosphere, or other appropriate opportunities to initiate dialogue and reciprocity.Exploring experiential learning activites for potential incorporation into food safety curriculum training sessions, such as conducting education on-farm/on-site, hands-on training on relevant FSMA compliance responsibilities (e.g. labeling, record-keeping, testing of agricultural water or refrigerated trucks), mock food safety audits, encouraging peer visits to one another's operations, etc. Since all of these options cannot be tested through this small project, those learning activities most preferred by the target audience and feasible within the parameters of this project will be selected for piloting.Evaluation of Outreach and Education Activities - At the end of each of the four pilot food safety training/networking sessions, written surveys will be administered to collect participant demographics, qualitative feedback, and self-reported evaluation data in a variety of areas. For example, the latter may assess knowledge gained about FSMA compliance requirements applicable to their business, increases in access to peer knowledge sharing networks, ratings on the usefulness of training on food safety practices received, etc. The project team will aslo debrief together after each of the four pilot sessions in order to guide continued refinement of the curriculum and documentation of best practices/lessons learned. Lastly, collaborating CTAHR Extension Agent Fred Reppun will conduct follow-up interviews with participants to gather more in-depth, qualitative feedback for the evaluation of the project.Dissemination of Results - Project results, including curriculum materials, documentationofpiloted delivery methodology, and lessons/best practices learned will be open to the public and disseminate as widely as possible to stakeholders.Potential Challenges and Limitations - Several challenges and limitations may arise due to the short, one-year period of this project. Timely and accurate curriculum devlopment activities for this pilot project depend, in part, on finalizing standardized FSMA training curriculum materials and launching of the Produce Safety Alliance's training program. We plan to engage in a participatory process to guide the design and development of the new curriculum, which may call for multiple, time-intensive iterations of dialogue and requires flexibility to respond to needs/opportunities identified by the target audience needs and consider stakeholder input previously not foreseen. Recruiting small farms, processors and wholesale operators to participate in training/networking sessions is typically challenging due to their already heavy workloads.Tracking actual changes in behavior among participants is not feasible during this short one-year performance.