Tessa Nasca records focus group feedback as part of their work with ANC.

Many grad students enter their Master’s degree or PhD with the hopes of helping their community. Community-campus engagement (CCE) is one way students can maximize the community benefits of their research. CCE work requires a significant time commitment, and it can be difficult to balance one’s research interests with the needs of the community. But this type of research can be extremely rewarding and give a completely unique perspective to the community issues at hand.

CFICE spoke to Tessa Nasca who completed an MA thesis in community-campus engagement to get some tips on how to do a CCE-related thesis.

Choosing to first enter grad school, and then selecting a research topic isn’t necessarily the only order in which to do things. For Tessa Nasca, Trent MA Sustainability graduate, it was the community organization that called first. Nasca took a different route to their master’s research. Rather than starting as a student and choosing a project, Nasca found an initiative that was looking for a student.

Nasca worked with the Stewart Street Active Neighbourhoods Project, in Peterborough. Nasca was able to work with this participatory planning project, whose goals are to engage members of the community who are traditionally marginalized and excluded from planning processes of this nature. Their role was to help plan and implement the project, but also to allow for a participatory evaluation of the project, and this is what led to a thesis. Nasca’s graduate work offered a direct line to their future career, and they now work as a project manager for the Active Neighbourhoods Project at the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation.

Community-minded graduate students’ goals are often to support community-based projects that they are passionate about while at the same time attaining a degree and building a career. However, Nasca warns that doing a CCE based thesis might not be for everyone. It definitely takes a certain type of student to be able to undertake this work. It’s important that students ensure they are needed by the community. Working with a community project can require a significant amount of time and training, and students want to make sure they can work independently enough without requiring a personal on-the-job supervisor.

(From left to right) Tessa Nasca, Katie Caddigan, Nadine Changfoot, and Jason Hartwick meet to discuss the ANC Peterborough Project.

Speaking of jobs, pursuing a degree that involves CCE work is an extremely time-intensive process and students might find themselves putting in similar amounts of time that would be required for a full-time job. With respect to time, Nasca said, “Be prepared to put in more time than a lot of your peers,” at least at the Master’s level.

Students need to be prepared for the time investment that proper community-campus engagement demands. In order for the project to be mutually beneficial, students need to invest in creating meaningful relationships with the community partners. The effort towards building close relationships and maintaining a community-first perspective with the research can lead to rewarding results.

According to Nasca, , the local coordinating organization behind Peterborough’s Active Neighbourhoods Project work, was “able to apply some of the evaluation results [from their master’s thesis] when seeking additional funding to scale-up the Active Neighbourhoods project approach. GreenUP was successful in acquiring a three year Ontario Trillium Foundation grant to scale up the project approach that we piloted and evaluated.” Funders tend to be attracted to the evidence-based approaches, and student research can help build this base of evidence to demonstrate the efficacy of a particular project approach.

If you’re considering doing a thesis that involves CCE, remember that the community comes first. Make sure you are passionate about the project, and that they are passionate about you. If you’re willing to put in the work, a CCE thesis can give you a direct path to an awesome career, and will allow you to help your community along the way!

The research took place as part of the Active Neighbourhoods project running out of CFICE’s Environmental Sustainability hub in Phase I.

Abstract

This research evaluated a community-led participatory planning process that sought to involve citizens who are often marginalized within planning processes. Participatory planning – which is theoretically informed by communicative planning theory – may shift the legacy of power and marginalization within planning processes and improve planning outcomes, foster social cohesion, and enhance the quality of urban life. The two-year Stewart Street Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) project aimed to build capacity among residents of a low-income neighbourhood in Peterborough, Ontario and to influence City planning processes impacting the neighbourhood. The project, led by a community-based organization, GreenUP, fostered collaborative interactions between residents and planning experts and supported residents to build and leverage collective power within planning processes. The participatory planning approach applied in the Stewart Street ANC transformed – and at times unintentionally reproduced – inequitable power relations within the planning process. Importantly, we found that GreenUP was a vital power broker between marginalized residents and more formal power holders, and successfully supported residents to voice their collective visions within professionalized planning contexts.

Map of Peterborough’s Stewart Street Neighbourhood ©ANC Peterborough

The is a participatory planning project that seeks to find more meaningful ways to engage citizens in urban planning.

For Peterborough’s Stewart Street neighbourhood, the ANC Peterborough project empowers community residents and local organizations to collaboratively reimagine and advocate for a greener, healthier, more active neighbourhood space that is safe and accessible for all residents.

As the local coordinator of the ANC Peterborough project, – an environmental charity in the city of Peterborough – acts as the intermediary between Stewart Street neighbourhood residents, the City of Peterborough, and other community partners. GreenUP takes an embedded approach to their work, frequently interacting, engaging, and supporting the residents and project participants directly. This approach has helped foster a greater atmosphere of trust between all project partners.

The second pilot project to take place in Ontario as part of a national project with 12 pilot projects taking place across three provinces and the first to be run in a community substantially smaller than the metro Toronto or Montréal Areas, the ANC Peterborough project faced certain challenges when it started.

Brianna Salmon is GreenUP’s Executive Director and a community partner with the CES hub. ©the Peterborough Examiner

Brianna Salmon, GreenUP’s Executive Director, indicated at the very beginning of the project, many of the partners were not sure how they fit in or how they could contribute.

As a city with a widespread population, a cohesive network of neighbourhood associations connecting city residents did not exist in Peterborough. Without an already-established network, it was more difficult for GreenUP to get residents to engage in the project.

But the challenge led to GreenUP developing their embedded approach, which started by meeting and connecting with residents through surveys, resident conversations, and face-to-face conversations at neighbourhood events.

The embedded approach was further developed through CFICE’s research and evaluation support. With funding provided through CFICE’s Environmental Sustainability hub, GreenUP hired Masters of Sustainability Studies student Tessa Nasca as the ANC Peterborough project Research Assistant.

Tessa Nasca, embedded RA with the Active Neighbourhoods Canada Peterborough Project.

As part of her research, Nasca helped the local ANC partnership evaluate the project by supporting citizen forums, gathering partner and resident feedback, and contributing to the development of tools like a Neighbourhood Plan for the Stewart Street neighbourhood.

According to Nasca, there are three major ways in which the partnership hopes the ANC Peterborough project will impact the neighborhood: increased citizen engagement; the development of more active public spaces; and, a neighbourhood design that allows for active transportation, including cycling, walking, and transit.

The (MUEC), with funding from the Public Health Agency of Canada, provides support for all 12 national pilot projects.MUEC is a non-profit organization that has successfully used the Active, Healthy, and Green Neighbourhood planning approach in several boroughs in Montreal. In Ontario, the four provincial pilot projects are supported by the . In each local community, there are local coordinating organizations like GreenUP.

Through pilot projects like ANC Peterborough, MUEC is hoping to expand and test this participatory planning approach in different community contexts across Canada.

ANC project participants hard at work.
©Elizabeth Thipphawong

Because of the participatory nature of the project, the ANC Peterborough project will continue to evolve. It’s not a project that specifically leads to an end, but rather a project about fostering a process that is important and meaningful in engaging people. With hope, this active citizen engagement will carry on long beyond the project in Peterborough’s Stewart Street neighbourhood.

Residents participate in providing feedback at a Ryerson student-hosted Citizens’ Forum. ©Nadine Changfoot

This semester, the Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) Peterborough project engaged a group of seven Masters of Planning students from Ryerson University in the development of a “Neighbourhood Plan” for the Stewart St. Neighbourhood. As a part of their final studio project, these students worked with the ANC steering committee, the Toronto Centre for Active Transportation, and Stewart St. neighbourhood residents to gather feedback and propose design interventions to improve infrastructure in the Stewart Street neighbourhood. The Ryerson students hosted a “Citizen’s Forum” event in March, and over 35 residents came out to discuss their priorities for neighbourhood infrastructure. The Ryerson students took this feedback, and correlated it with local political and planning opportunities to realize the residents’ vision for public space in their neighbourhood.

Organizing focus group feedback on the ANC-CFICE project ©Nadine Changfoot

The Active Neighbourhoods Canada (ANC) CFICE demonstration project is underway in Peterborough, Ontario. The project, which is a part of a national network of twelve projects that use participatory design towards a goal of creating green, active, and healthy neighbourhoods, has been working with Peterborough’s Stewart Street neighbourhood since June 2014. The project creates opportunities for marginalized residents to engage in planning the public spaces, streets, and sidewalks in their neighbourhood.

Brianna Salmon, Peterborough GreenUp, and Tessa Nasca, CFICE RA, work with the feedback provided at the ANC-CFICE focus group. ©Nadine Changfoot

While the ANC project brings together a diverse group of partners and funders, CFICE’s contribution to the research and evaluation component of the project provides valuable capacity to the project. CFICE-funded graduate student researcher, Tessa Nasca, from the Masters of Sustainability Studies program at Trent University, has been embedded in the project steering committee from the onset of the project. Recently, she has started to conduct evaluative research. Through a series of focus groups with neighbourhood residents and project steering committee members, the research seeks to determine the efficacy of the participatory planning approaches used in the ANC project.

Organizing focus group feedback for the ANC-CFICE project ©Nadine Changfoot

In December 2015, neighbourhood residents were invited to attend a focus group to provide feedback on the project activities. The focus group for the steering committee took place in January 2016. Chevalier and Buckles’ Participatory Action Research Methods were used to guide participants through generating a set of evaluation criteria, in order to help the researcher to understand what effective community engagement looks like from a resident perspective. Using these criteria, residents reflected on the ANC project activities they had participated in, and ranked the activities relative to their evaluation criteria, creating charts as shown in the photos above.

While the data from these focus groups are still being analyzed and the results are not yet ready to share, they provided a rich opportunity for reflection on the ANC project, and on the efficacy of its activities in engaging neighbourhood residents.