FIELD NOTES: BETTER EAT BETTER

2022 - present

Start Small, While Thinking Big

In 2022 we embarked on a social permaculture project for 3Pumpkins. The project started small. Tiny in fact. For about two months, all we did was spend time with the children and the community work team from the Tak Takut Kids Club (TTKC) through a weekly community composting and soil building ritual.

In mid 2022, the tiny environmental and social composting action evolved into a neighbourhood co-creation and explorative participatory action project. We designed and shaped a permaculture food garden called Kebun Rasa Sayang together as part of the HeritageFest 2022. The basis of the garden project was to explore the question:

“As Singapore transforms into a City in Nature, how does a community learn to care for themselves and each other with the plants they grow at in the neighbourhood?”

It was an ever evolving garden, but some of the key features in the Think Green garden included:

• How can we use what we are growing in the community kitchen more?
• Can we use the garden and kitchen to make a social impact?
• What does it mean to eat healthy food? What is healthy food?
• What are the health challenges faced by the community that can be addressed through food?
• How do we get healthier through better food choices?

That is how we started thinking about shaping a community garden and kitchen project into a local neighbourhood food and health programme for children.

Building a Movement for Health

As we explored ways to make the community garden and kitchen programme impactful, an opportunity presented itself. The MOH Office for Healthcare Transformation (MOHT) 'Movements for Health' programme sprang up. MOHT launched an initiative to support bottom-up efforts in mobilising communities to enhance their own health and well-being.

We responded to this call with 3Pumpkins. Together we tapped on our ability to collaborate. We combined our expertise in community development and permaculture design. We put our heads, heart and hands together and created, Better Eat Better (BEB).

The Better Eat Better is a community health movement and programme that aims to enable children to make better food choices. It began in November 2022 at the Tak Takut Kids Club (TTKC), a vital community space for vulnerable children and youth aged 7-14 in Boon Lay Drive.

Created to address critical gaps in knowledge, access to healthy foods, and the essential skills needed to empower young ones to make healthier food choices, BEB aims to be a transformative kitchen and garden food program that fosters a 'cook, grow, shop, play and eat & share' food culture.

Grow Together: The TTKC Garden offers children the chance to grow and care for plants which are used and consumed in the community kitchen. This empowers them to become food producers in their own neighbourhood.

Shop Together: Food are easily purchased in the neighbourhood. What knowledge do children need to make informed food choices? Through shopping together, BEB involves children in proactive budgeting, reading food labels, and recognising ingredients to make healthier choices.

Cook Together: The TTKC Kitchen is where children learn to prepare snacks like pancakes, wraps, and sandwiches, and even cook dinners for the community. Through cooking together, children gain the skills to confidently create simple, tasty, and nutritious food for themselves, their friends and families.

​ Eat Together: Children build a sense of community by serving food and sharing meals to ensure everyone enjoy the fruits of their labour. Through these shared experiences, they learn to appreciate diversity of food and culture.
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The Sandwitches Club: A children-led initiative for healthy sandwiches to be made for TTKC excursions and community events. The club makes at least 40 sandwiches for every excursion, thus solving the issue of having to buy expensive and less nutritious snacks for the outings.

The Approach

Participatory Action Research serves as a framework for research and knowledge generation, rooted in the belief that the community most impacted by interventions should actively participate in the research and development process. The PAR process is organic and iterative, with programme implementation constantly tested and tweaked based on community feedback and environmental changes.

PAR is often non-linear and ‘messy’ in practice. Every interaction, observation, and reflection shapes the process in unexpected ways, leading to new outcomes. For example, an impromptu video created for fun revealed TTKC community's hidden filmmaking talents. This discovery resulted in the creation of a 10-minute edutainment video that was screened to a wider public.

Referred to as "action spiral research", PAR is best understood as a longitudinal journey where multiple phases coexist concurrently. Thus, astute observational and reflective skills are crucial for programme designers to guide the community towards shared objectives.

How Participatory Action Research was used iteratively with the BEB Project

The BEB team embraced this methodology by engaging in iterative cycles of plan for change & act, observe & reflect, and re-plan & act. This dynamic and overlapping approach is exemplified in the spiral graphic above.

For examples of how this was implemented on-the-ground read the full 'Better Eat Better Participatory Action Research Report 2024' written by Project Directors Nova Nelsonand Lin Shiyun.

Sustaining a Movement

As permaculture designers our role has been to lead the design and creation of a dynamic food and social learning programme. We’ve been deploying permaculture design methods and strategies to lead placemaking efforts (kitchen and garden), participatory action research (PAR), capacity building, education, social learning, systems design, movement development and engagement process on the ground.

A display of the BEB project for an open day at the Kebun Rasa Sayang

Food is such a fundamental part of our lives. And running a community food and health programme can be complicated. To ensure impact, food programmes require many different parts, players and collaborators to make a difference. It also needs time, resources, technical expertise, a community team, space, consistency, social support and funding.

Since 2022, we’ve been creating impact with 3Pumpkins on the ground through the Better Eat Better programme. Better Eat Better is funded by the Ministry of Health Office for Health Transformation (MOHT) and supported by funders The Majurity Trust.

Currently, the project is 75% funded by the Singaporean government and the Tote Board. 3Pumpkins is actively looking for financial support to close the funding gap.

They are also looking for volunteer befrienders who would like to participate in weekly in our community engagement efforts, and creative individuals who would like to share with the children and families how to prepare affordable, simple and nutritious food.

If you’d like to support the ongoing efforts with the Better Eat Better Movement please write to team@3pumpkins.org.

The Better Eat Better Toolkit

If you're curious about how we created the programme and implemented it you can now do so here with our ' Better Eat Better Toolkit: A Practical Guide to Implementing a Child-Centric Community Food Literacy Programme' 

This toolkit applies Simon Sinek’s Golden Circle thinking framework — Why, How, What — to help practitioners navigate the dynamic and non-linear world of community work. Within this broad framework it explores how practitioners can uncover the true purpose behind their involvement and how self-determination theory, permaculture design principles, and participatory action research can guide the effective implementation of programmes on the ground.

Part guide, part story, and part inspirational testimony, this toolkit encapsulates methods and approaches to support initiatives focused on raising awareness, taking action, and advocating for better health through a neighbourhood food literacy programme with children. These resources can be adapted and applied by grassroots community efforts seeking to integrate food and health education into their programmes and community engagement activities.

Do you have a dormant space you’d like to transform into an abundant and productive food space? Or do you have a community you’d like to build a Permaculture Food Garden for? Tell us more about your space and objectives by filling out the form below.