1. Name of organization:
Culture²2. Email address (or preferred and reliable way of official contact):
hello@culture-culture.com3. Tell us about your organization:
Culture² is a platform which focuses on highlighting research related to community biology, ancestral knowledge, and creative biology while also specifically highlighting the research of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ practitioners of various socioeconomic backgrounds and lived experiences. We focus on slow platform development with an emphasis on paying contributors, building relationships, and providing opportunities for emerging practitioners.Our board of directions and organizers can be seen here:
https://culture-culture.com/aboutus/ About Us (Board of Directors, Organizers)
Our current projects have been:
- Our conference in 2021, which shall soon be integrated into a syllabus that will be paired with our journal: https://culture-culture.com/portal2021/ (Link to 2021 Conference Portal/ Archive)
- Our peer-reviewed journal will be published in Spring-Summer 2022. We will be taking a new approach to a peer-reviewed model which will be emphasized in a “dialogue” style format.
4. Does your organization have representation for a marginalized demographic due to factors such as, but not limited to, race, ability, place of birth, gender, sexual orientation, socioeconomic class situation or other identification? If so, how?
To the best of our ability, we do. Although we do not advertise that we are a diversity forward platform (to avoid tokenization), we make sure to consult (we pay honorariums for), and build our platforms with various culturally specific communities to make sure the platform’s vision supports a need.
For example, we have built our journal and conference so far to support not only established researchers, but to highlight emerging work as well that might seem unconventional (ex, small scale/ culturally specific farming) to traditional research institutions or granting bodies with more conservative views.
Instead of focusing on building an audience based on an institutional celebration of science, we have found niches in supporting practices such as market gardening, climate activism, food sovereignty, and food processing which can integrate a scientific approach at a community level. This allows us to reach a wider audience at varying socioeconomic backgrounds.
5. What is the event about, and what do you want to achieve with it?
Within the current COVID era, there has been a growing interest in building businesses and developing research on the cultivation of locally grown + culturally specific foods using traditional farming methods in urban communities local to Ontario, Canada.There are many practitioners and community leaders from equity deserving groups within Ontario’s food systems whose practices do not currently qualify for academic or arts funding (the funding models are quite conservative), but are incredibly relevant in addressing issues related to sustainability and community science. Another incentive in this initiative is to provide formal opportunities for equity deserving groups to build up experience with tangible outcomes in preparation for future funding opportunities to support their work.
The event that we would like to hold focuses on including various stakeholders in food systems (within Toronto, Canada) to document strategies and co-design tools that could be used in the cultivation and processing of crops for culturally specific needs. This was inspired by one of our community members sharing their personal research in finding culturally specific but climate resilient crops with experimental plots; and another member whose practice centers around Black futurisms focuses on developing open source protocols and hardware for propagation and cultivation.
We are currently looking at a hybrid-event (depending on what our public health regulations allow) for a three day program which focuses on mentorship, site visits, meals, and project development with community leaders. The in-person programming will take place in Toronto, Canada.
With our current administrative capacity, the number of selected applicants that we can support so far is 15 (of varying levels of backgrounds and expertise). We also would like to specifically provide a scholarship for Black, Indigenous, and participants of colour as well as financially precarious individuals to not only compensate for their time, but to be able to take three days off (of work or other kinds of labor) to be able to participate.
Steps:
Pre-Production
Consultations with experts in various cultural farming practices, community science + social justice workers, and Indigenous new media technologists to assess the scope and develop a more granular events calendar.
Day 1- Roundtable + Speakers:
A day of roundtable discussion, experience sharing, speakers, and an unconference style breaking out into two groups. The opening discussions will include introductions and examples of open source hardware that is relevant to the field of agriculture and community science. Speakers are experienced in community based hardware development, agricultural data collections, and ancestral knowledge.
Day 2- Ideation + Check-In:
Moving from ideation to low fidelity prototyping and working with workshop technical assistants and workshop leaders.
Day 3- Documentation + Check-In:
Project scope and rough prototyping will take place, documentation will also be collected and turned into a collaborative small publication (zine), with the addition of online and accessible documentation.
Post Production:
- Since we involve varying backgrounds and levels of experience from various stages, we would like to hire either a fabricator, hardware, or software developer to conceptualize any of the projects over the weekend.
- The post-production project builders will be sourced by the community and involved in the first stages of building an iteration of designs based on the co-design process. Our organizers and board members are well versed in varying levels of technical expertise, but we would like to compensate and involve someone local to our geographical community as well as offset some additional labour from organizing (organizers are unpaid).
- There will also be the development of an e-zine (pdf) that outlines the research process and project development. Web development will be done internally (no budget for this needed).
6. Which of the three levels of funding would you like to apply for? (in round 1 only USD $9910 is available for applications, in further rounds $3000, $6000, or USD $9910 will be available):
Round 1
7. What is the funding for? Describe your budget. List what you are going to spend it on and how.
The current request for funding is based on our current understanding of organizing needs (which could be subject to change).
(CRADD application had great formatting for their budget so we copied them!)
| Unit | Quantity | Unit Price $ USD | Total Amount | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Community Leader Consultation | Consult | 2 | $100 USD | $200 USD |
| Administration: (Promotion, press, social media, email, invitation copy, Q&A Sessions, Toolkit Development) |
Monthly | 5 | $100 USD | $500 USD |
| 3-Day Event Photographer | Photographer | 1 | $200 USD | $200 USD |
| Speaker Fee | Honorarium | 3 | $400 USD | $1200 USD |
| Workshop Technical Assistant | Day | 3 | $200 USD | $600 USD |
| Scholarship | Participants | 7 | $400 USD | $600 USD |
| In-Person Event Hub/ Venue (TBD) | Full Day | 2 | $600 | $1200 USD |
| Welcome Package (notebook, workbook, pens, stickynotes, prototyping materials) |
Pariticpants | 15 | $20 USD | $300 USD |
| Transportation | Participants | 15 | $15.50 | $260.50 USD |
| Grocereies (Ingredients for meals) | Participants | 15 | $33.3 | $500 USD |
| Accessibility Needs (Transcription/ ASL as requested) |
Software/Service | 1 | $220 (20 for transcription + $200 ASL interpreter) |
$200 USD |
| Post-Production Assistant Fee | Assistant | 2 | $500 USD | $1000 USD |
| Prototyping Material Budget | Group Projects | 2 | $500 USD | $1000 USD |
| Total Amount: | $9960.50 |
8. How will you share the outcomes of this event? What documentation will result that will benefit the community as a whole? (videos? photos? a how-to? innovative hardware designs?)
We will be sharing the documentation process online including photos, hardware designs (on social media, website) and in print.Documentation could include potential how-to’s, hardware designs, and web app ideas/ prototypes. A small series of zines (self published low cost books) will be developed and distributed within food systems activists, community tech zine distributors, and publication communities (a popular avenue of information sharing within interdisciplinary activist communities).
9. How would your event address GOSH’s values of diversity and inclusion?
We are opening up our applications to a wide range of skills with an emphasis on lived experience not only with racialized equity deserving groups, but are planning to accommodate what is generally a hardware centric event to work with food workers in agriculture and service (who might or might not have an existing relationship with do-it-yourself tool making).Through years of experience in workshop organizing with equity deserving groups, one strategy that has been employed is to hire a post production assistant to “bring it all together” as a point of iteration. In providing this service, we hope to alleviate the pressure off of participants in having an intermediate baseline of technical knowledge, so we can access a wider audience as well as a tangible and polished outcome which can support the future endeavours of participants.