Project Foundation and Boundaries

Your Why
You are drawn to this work because you'll be bringing about change in your community and making hope visible. This matters to you personally. Behind it lies your conviction that skills development and value-adding—turning harvested produce and grown herbs into something useful rather than letting them go to waste—can be done with your own hands. You want to shift how people, especially young people, think about building their own legacy and becoming their own boss rather than depending on government grants. You are starting with your local community and its surroundings, focusing initially on food lovers, mothers with school-going children, and household members, though you also recognize that competition and keeping pace with market trends remain outside your control.
Your Project's Purpose
Help your community move from dependence toward building their own legacy and becoming their own boss. You want mothers with school-going children and other household members—particularly food lovers in your local community and its surroundings—to experience skills development and the ability to add value to what you grow and harvest. This means transforming waste into beautiful, handmade things and doing things with your own hands rather than letting nothing go to waste. The change matters to you because it makes hope visible in your community. This is a working purpose: you aim to shift people's mindset, especially among youth, away from depending on government grants and toward self-reliance and job creation for others. What lies outside your project's control is competition and the need to keep pace with market trends.
What You Bring
Existing experience: You are a gardener doing vertical farming in a 200 square meter yard and a seed distributor who has hosted workshops in your garden to discuss growing and nurturing plants using organic methods without chemicals.
Knowledge of the situation: You understand current unemployment conditions and the reliance on government grants and child support, and you see potential in offering school holiday vacancies with incentives for high school learners.
Skills and perspective: You can identify value in materials that would otherwise be wasted, and you believe in involving your community in your work as part of a social enterprise approach rather than working in isolation.
Relationships and access: You currently have your own kitchen with limited resources, and you rely on market days and your neighbours to sell products and build your customer base.
Mindset work you are prepared to do: You aim to change people's mindset, especially among youth, to build their own legacy and become their own boss rather than depend on government grants.
Capability gap: You need to learn and get information on ethical, safety, fairness and privacy boundaries to guide how you develop and test your work, and you identify competition and keeping up with market trends as currently outside your control.
Where You Must Begin
ConstraintWhat it means for where I startKitchen workspace and limited resourcesYou can begin by working with what you have in your kitchen, which means your initial testing and development will be constrained to the scale and equipment available there.Market days and neighbour relationshipsYou can start by drawing on your existing relationships with neighbours and your access to market days as your initial channel for reaching people and gathering feedback.Learning about ethical, safety, fairness and privacy boundariesYou have identified that you need to learn more about ethical, safety, fairness and privacy considerations, but you have not yet specified which of these boundaries are most relevant to your work or how they should shape what you test first.How You Think the Change Happens
Chain of steps: You believe the pathway runs from partnering and collaborating with other farmers and laborers, to establishing storage space, to moving into making your own products like essential oils, which you see as benefiting many people in your community who currently lack access to such opportunities.
Least certain step: The shelf life and quality testing of your products concerns you most, since they have not yet been tested or approved by food standards and regulations, and you are uncertain about how to navigate these requirements.
Critical dependencies: The pathway depends on the help of a qualified specialist.
Community decisions: You believe the people affected should help you make decisions about testing the products and marketing them.
What You'll Test First
First assumption to test: You should never work on assumptions; instead you get facts and proper feedback on how people feel or are affected by your work.
What you need to learn: You need to learn the needs of your customers through always getting feedback, giving testers access, and sometimes using a questionnaire to guide whether to revise or pause.
Your decision rule: You have stated you will revise or pause based on what you learn, but you have not named a condition that would lead you to stop.