Engaging in larger global problems such as climate action and green recovery can be difficult when marginalized groups face more pressing needs such as ensuring there is adequate food on the table, settling into a new country, affording somewhere to live, and the fear of personal safety. The time spent worrying about survival needs can often prevent these groups from engaging with the community and fostering a sense of camaraderie within the neighbourhood.

Our goal for the Dialogue Diary is to ensure that it is a useful and thought provoking tool, so that using it could increase a sense of belonging and self-efficacy, which has shown to be correlated with greater resilience towards challenges that can be important to civic engagement and development. We wanted the Dialogue Diary to foster personal reflection and create an opportunity for members to engage in topics they genuinely care about, as this is essential in building camaraderie and community cohesion.

As our semester has been hosted remotely, we found some limitations in our research and product development. For example, we received low user feedback as many marginalized groups may not have had access to technology, thus we have a lack of representation from groups such as Seniors, who play a large role in the Joyce-Collingwood community. For the future, we would ensure that we make spaces for underrepresented voices at every step to have a more meaningful, user-centred process. It was also important for us to get input from as many stakeholders as possible, while keeping the end user’s needs a priority. We also would like to aggregate the anonymous data we collected to inform community partners and the City of Vancouver of ways they can improve the neighbourhood.