Highlights of the Project

Community Needs Assessment

 

 

In order to know more about the Agriculture industry in Hong Kong, we interviewed two local farms. One is the traditional farm located in Tai Po and the other is the Rooftop Republic.

Community Needs Assessment helps us to organize our thoughts and make everything easier to understand and analyze. 

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  4. Define: "How Might We statement" --> the main focus of our project

      

      HOW MIGHT WE encourage the teenagers who are interested in Urban farming to step into this career/industry so that the Rooftop Farmers can gather more talents for further development.

      

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Solution Idea generation

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1. Ideate: After we set our HMW statement, we started to brainstorm different ideas, which include different focuses (Policy, Funding, Collaboration with schools, etc. )

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Collaboration with schools

- The government can design a new subject in Secondary school/ Universities

- Collaborating with universities for credit transfer/certificate granting

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Funding

- Set up subsidies for people who want to start their business on Rooftop Farming

 

Policy

- Credit bank linking personal contribution to local environmental initiatives 

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2. How do we come out with the final idea? --> SWOT

  From this SWOT, we think that we should better make use of our strengths. In our school, we don't have an agriculture course but we do have a service-learning and culture course which provides something that related to Agriculture. That's why we think that organizing a summer activity or course is great for our students. For example, someone who has done their service-learning course, if they find themselves interested in Rooftop farming, still has an opportunity to know more about it. It's great for our students to get in touch with different industries, which can help them to better plan their future careers.

 

       Final Idea: Organizing an Agriculture Course (For Lingnan Students)

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Prototype Development

 

Prototype: Here's our prototype process! We have a total of three rounds of prototype development of our project. 

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The first part of prototype development 

 In the beginning, we designed our prototype by drawing our ideas. Shown below are drawings depicting a student who is interested in Rooftop Farming, and he can participate in the Agriculture course provided by our school.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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The second part of Prototype development

After that, Prof. Zoe invited Mr. Chad CHAN (Senior Project Officer) to help us with our prototype development. In fact, in the beginning, we want to organize a course rather than an activity. During the consultation, we found that the process of organizing a course seems too complicated and the final outcome may not good as our expectation. After a few discussions, we found that holding an activity that links up with ILP units may be a better choice. It can achieve the same outcomes and it's easier to manage at the same time. Therefore, we changed our mind from holding a new course to an activity. 

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Activity Plan

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We start consulting with Mr. Chad CHAN (Senior Project Officer) and creating an activity plan. As you can see in the promotion video, we designed three main parts for our activity plan, including theory lessons, farming, and guest sharing. We also included the budget plan and promotional items in our plan. After 4 weeks of consultations, we got our proposal done! You can check out our details on our activity page!

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While we are still discussing our activity plan, we need to start preparing our promotion video at the same time. We decided to show the video to students through email to inform and attract them to join our activity.

 

 

Promotion Video

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In order to promote our activity, we have different promotional items. Promotion video is the most important one as the video is a "fastest" way that enables the people to know more about our activity. Not only can we show it at the booth during the promotion period, the video but we can also upload it to social media.

Prof. Zoe and Mr. Chan provided us a great platform --> Vyond (Video Making Software)

 

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3. We addressed the video many times. You can see the background information, details of our activity in our promotion video! (CHECK THIS OUT--> ACTIVITY PAGE!!)

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Test: In order to improve our ideas, we tested the prototype with two different groups of people!

After we drafted our plan and video, we had our first prototype testing with Rooftop Republic (Rooftop Farming Organization in Hong Kong) to see whether how we can improve our ideas. 

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Testing with the Rooftop Republic

First, we interviewed two people from the Rooftop Republic Organization.

They are Raven Ching (Assistant project manager) and Kendy Lee (Financial director). We perceive them as the end beneficiary in our project as they may benefit from the change. During the interview, we mainly asked them the questions around whether they are willing to become one of our partners for this project or not and the reasons why. They gave us lots of useful opinions such as the importance of setting a budget plan for the invitation and some suggestions for the activity schedule. Base on this kind of suggestion, we made some adjustments and improved the activity plan.

 

They suggested we combine the theory lessons and farming on the same day. After they learn something in the morning, they can do it in the afternoon. This can strengthen their knowledge and it would be much more interesting than only having a lesson for the whole day.

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The third part of prototype development 

 

In the final part, we also had our second testing with students from Hope College (US), they provided us some ideas. 

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Testing with students from Hope College

The second prototype testing with students from the US. During the conversation, we found that the problems identified in Hong Kong can be also observed in the US as well, which is the low awareness of the agriculture industry among those young people. They mentioned even though agriculture development has come of age in the US (you can find a lot of big companies around-Sunkist etc.), but for young people, agriculture is not a common or popular career/ industry that they will join after graduation. After that, we showed them our promotion video and we found that the idea of Rooftop Farming activity can be applied in the US as well. Another useful point is that they have mentioned the Career service center at their school is useful for them, they think it can help them to build up the network for their future career path. 

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We decided to add some details to our activity. 

1. Invite LingnanU Elder Academy Programme --> let more people know what is Rooftop Farming!

2. Invite three guest speakers who work in different careers (all related to agriculture industry) --> enable the student to broaden the possibilities of their career path

3. Collaborating with SSC --> SSC Career Advising Service to take part in our project. SSC can help students who have performed well in the activity to build up their network. After the activity, SSC may give students a reference letter and send them to different organizations and if they want to. If the organization accepts the recommendation, the students can have a higher priority to join the organization in the future.

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Finally, we finalized our project, you can check it out on our activity page!