A carnival-style event, Food It Forward! aims to raise awareness about food wastage and encourage students in NTU to give surplus food a new lease of life through alternative ways.
Organised by WSC GO! in February 2017 as part of a CoLab4Good initiative – Foodbank@NTU, Food It Foward! was not just a campaign meant to influence the NTU community to be more conscious and informed about their contributions to food waste in Singapore, it was also a chance for staff and students to play an active role.
Booths set up by GO!, The Foodbank Singapore, Earthlink NTU and Final Year Project Group, “Hungry for Change” collectively promoted food waste awareness through mini activities including interactive games involving interesting facts and information about food waste in Singapore, Do-It-Yourself workshops to create useful objects out of empty metal cans, and a food donation drive.
An Instagram contest ran in tandem with the event, from 2 to 15 February 2017, to promote the Food Bank Boxes that are currently around the NTU compound, and encourage positive action. Participants simply needed to take a photo demonstrating the donation of food items into one of the four Food Bank Boxes in NTU, and upload it to Instagram with the hashtags #FoodbankNTU and #FooditForward with a caption about the importance of reducing food wastage. Five winners were picked and received a pair of movie tickets as their prize.
The Highlights
Food-It-Forward Takeaways
The event went smoothly without any major hiccups. There was no issue with transporting and setting up the event logistics and the booth activities were conducted smoothly as well.
One important takeaway from this event was realising that food waste is an important issue that is often overlooked. Many people do not know a lot about the impacts of food waste and how they can easily help to reduce it. Hence awareness campaigns are still necessary to shed more light on the subject and encourage people to take action. Working on this project also provided valuable experience on how to organise such a campaign and how to improve future events.
The Memories
Reflection #1 – The Challenges
Unmaterialised Ideas
As this was our team’s first venture in conducting a food waste campaign, we did not have prior experience or knowledge about how to run such an event. Despite so, we had multiple brainstorming sessions and managed to produce several ideas that we were looking forward to execute. However, given logistical issues, lack of manpower and our tight planning schedule, we had to abandon a social media campaign and an impactful publicity stunt, among other ideas. Nevertheless, we can still recycle these ideas and consider them for the next food waste campaign!
Reflection #2 – The Challenges
Participation
The turnout at the event was not as good as expected. Hence we reflected on feedback to try and understand why, and to help us improve in future.
Firstly, we received feedback that we could have chosen a more suitable venue. Though our event space received good traffic flow, it was too narrow. The area was too cramped during lunch hour for people to stop and take a look at the booths; hence a more spacious venue would have been better. Also, because of how the event space was a corridor walkway, our event banner had to be set up against a wall at the side, where it was not very visible to people walking by it, hence attracting less people.
Secondly, another feedback was that our publicity efforts were not maximised. Despite tapping on several publicity outlets, many people were still unaware of the event and the Instagram contest. The mediums we explored included sending out emails to the student body, posting on social media, putting up posters around campus and pasting table stickers at two of the largest food courts in NTU. However, most of them were only released the week before the actual event; hence the reason why our efforts did not reach many people may be due to this late publicity.
Given the chance to organise this campaign again, we will start publicising the event a few more weeks in advance to reach out to more participants.
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