DRCC River festival and farmers' market

I attended the DRCC River Festival last Saturday, and learned a lot from putting the survey and display board into use with folks who attended. The survey questions were designed to help us connect to participants, learn more about them and see if they are interested in becoming involved with the cleanup efforts in some way. So we had three questions:

1. Please tell us - are you a resident, business owner, or otherwise use the river in some fashion (whether that's fishing or otherwise)?

2. What are your hopes for the future of the Duwamish river?

3. Would you like to be involved in helping to protect/save the river?

Each time I design surveys like this one I'm reminded to really keep questions short and simple. I could usually get people to answer question #1 easily. For the second and third questions I noticed that most people didn't go into lots of detail other than responding "a clean river", and I had to let go of my tendencies to pressure folks to sign up to help DRCC. I tried paraphrasing question #3 to explain that we are planning to have further conversations with people who live and own businesses in the area about implementing the Vision plan, and that this is also a way that they could be involved, if they didn't show interest in helping with the cleanup. I also think some attendees may have thought we are asking them to actually help clean up the pollution in the river itself. Overall I talked with two young teens, a couple of residents, one former landlord who resides on Beacon Hill, a woman who works at a social service agency in the area, an indigenous woman who lives in Auburn and several political candidates for office.

I also had a less than successful conversation with a guy staffing the "People for Puget Sound" booth regarding the information they have about what kinds of fish and other sealife animals it is risky to eat. I tried asking him two questions: what can we say to people to whom fish and seafood is central to their diets, and are they offering any information about alternatives such as the nearest safe places that people can go fishing in? His responses were short and limited to saying that it's dangerous to consume any fish and seafood caught from the river, and shrugging his shoulders at the notion of offering alternatives. I am guessing that the way I phrased my questions made him feel defensive and/or just didn't connect to his perspective at all. A bit later when I talked to an indigenous woman, I noticed my internalized feelings of trying to get her to "sign up" to be involved with DRCC in some way (such as with the Vision plan implementation conversations) coming up again. This conversation was great practice for me to learn to just listen more genuinely and let go of my tendencies to nudge people to "take action". At the end of our conversation, although she refused to sign up for any DRCC activities she thanked me for listening to her stories of her late husband who was a fisherman in the area.

Yesterday I attended the new South Park Farmers' Market in the morning and helped do outreach for DRCC. We shared booth/table space with SeaMar and I connected with three people: Steve Gisel, co-manager of the farmers' market; Ninfa Quiroz, staff person at SeaMar; and Amaranta Sandys, a local multimedia artist who makes art thru use of clay. Steve stated that the farmers' market has several objectives including bringing together people who haven't had much experience with U.S. business practices, encouraging people to support local businesses and learn to eat more healthy foods. He said that they are trying to obtain funding to hold the market more often than once a month, and they have a business co-op for the vendors who participate. Also he added that although the vendors' earnings might not be very "high" currently they see the participation of the vendors as successful because they're learning how to do business.

Ninfa Quiroz and I talked about her concerns regarding the diet of the Latino community. She expressed a lot of worry about the tendencies of Latinos to eat a lot of carbohydrates, fats, salt and processed foods including in tortillas and tamales. She added that there's ways that people can still enjoy their traditional foods but reduce the amount of fat and carbohydrates in preparing tortillas and tamales. She emphasized that addressing health issues such as diabetes isn't just a matter of getting people to change their diets, they have to change other habits such as increasing their level of activity and exercising regularly. She asked if I could help SeaMar do some health education, and is also interested in the information that DRCC has about the dangers of eating fish and seafood caught from the Duwamish river. She looked at a coloring book for children that is printed in English and Spanish, that teaches children about animals in the local area and said that she would like to see another one regarding the dangers of eating fish and seafood from the Duwamish river. I told Ninfa that if DRCC, SeaMar and the South Park Farmers' market could partner somehow to have conversations about food and healthy alternatives that would be great. I plan to talk further with Cari about the possibilities of doing my Change project around these areas. Although Cari and I talked briefly about what my Change project could be before she left, this was before I had conversed with Ninfa in detail.

I also enjoyed talking with Amaranth, she makes pottery, clay magnets, pendants, beads and earrings with her own cultural style. For instance she has some magnets and earrings that are brightly colored skulls in honor of "Dia de los Muertos", the Mexican "Day of the Dead" celebration. Amaranth stated that she helped emcee at the River Festival last week. She is also connected to local artists' groups.

Joyce