There are many things to consider in advance of preparing and submitting your application for a SSHRC Partnership Grant. This month, CFICE has taken a look back at its own SSHRC application process and we have attempted to share some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way. This is the fourth article in our SYWASPG (So You Want to Apply for a SSHRC Partnership Grant) series. See our other stories on whether or not the SSHRC Partnership Grant is right for you, how to respectfully involve your community partners in the application process, and the ins and outs of Project Work Plans and Budgets.

Heather Reid chats with other CFICE members.

It’s no secret that with at least a dozen university partners and more than 60 community partners, spanning the course of seven years and across the country, the CFICE project has been—and continues to be—a pretty massive undertaking.

That’s not to say that it’s in any way better than a smaller partnership project that might have one or two or even three partners. Determining the size and scope of your research project really depends on your objective. Think of a bow and arrow. Your research question is the bow; your answers are the target. How many arrows will it take for you to hit your target? Repeatedly? In such a way that you can then pass what you have learned about your target onto the next archer? (Don’t forget, at the end of the day, a SSHRC Partnership Grant is indeed about funding the production of academic knowledge.)

CFICE’s current Principal Investigator (PI), Peter AndrĂ©e, says that CFICE “was appropriately-sized for its long-term objective, which was to identify ways to maximize the value of community-campus partnerships for the non-profit sector, and to further efforts to institutionalize what we’ve learned.” In other words, CFICE aimed to strengthen the Community-Campus Engagement movement as a whole in Canada. In order to do so, including partners from across a range of sectors and across the country was an appropriate—if lofty—goal.

But, that doesn’t mean that CFICE’s large size did not present some challenges.

The challenges of a multi-partner and large-scale research project

Within a multi-partner project with limited funds, there is only so much money to go around. Of course, the more partners you include, the thinner those funds must be spread.

“Our degree of engagement with specific partners really varied,” said AndrĂ©e of CFICE, which led to some community partners noting that the partnership ultimately had “limited impact” on their capacity or projects. In some instances, partners might have only received five thousand dollars, and limited follow-through.

If having many partners suits your project, then having open and honest communication about your project’s capacity and priorities can help to ensure that everyone has reasonable expectations for the project.

The CFICE team included community partners in a participatory budgeting process, which helped facilitate this communication in a more structured setting. Additionally, CFICE expanded its secretariat, because, as AndrĂ©e said, “project management, administration, and communications need to be especially strong in a large project that seeks to communicate with a broad network.”

The allocation of more time and resources into funding-related decision making can also be a downfall of a larger partnership project, as it means more costs are allocated to central administration. As Genevieve Harrison, CFICE’s Project Administrator, puts it, the process of allocating resources among many partners can also be “time consuming and contentious.”

“Partnerships that are smaller in scope can be more efficient in terms of communication and decision making,” said Harrison, though smaller partnerships can be subject to different constraints. For example, Harrison mentioned that, “Organizing a group with fewer players often is easier, unless those players have restricted time available to participate.”

Harrison spoke to how the issue of resources is generally a challenge regardless of the size of the partnership. The issue of insufficient compensation for community partners “is felt by both community partners and their academic counterparts,” Harrison said. “This is in part due to the fact that SSHRC funds opportunities for academics and students, and although it is aware of the need to fund community partners in research, does not see it as part of their mandate.”

While a larger research project generally presents the hurdle of coordinating and clearly communicating with many partners that are potentially spread across the country, that same large network can provide unique benefits, too.

The benefits of a multi-partner, large-scale research project

Large partnerships offer a wide network, which can then “offer exposure to a larger pool of participants that ultimately develops priorities for research that meet the needs of a larger community,” said Harrison.

As a result of having a larger research network, your project might create more “noise as partners assist in spreading the word about the research to a larger audience,”Ìęsaid Harrison. This noise or increased attention to your project can help to generate “larger in-kind contributions to the work and they can offer a greater variety of project resources,” Harrison added.

For CFICE, its large size meant it was able to engage a wide range of partners, including academics, institutions, students, and community organizations. AndrĂ©e attributes the large scale and scope of the project to the project’s ability to help “expand and extend the reach of thinking about community-campus partnerships.”

To make the most of a large-scale research project like CFICE, AndrĂ©e says its important to “do it with eyes wide open,” and be realistic about what you can promise your partners. “Find a partnership direction that fits the aspirations and needs of your wide partnership,” he said, and develop your project governance structure early on, and with input from with your partners.

Regardless of how many partners you have, or the physical distance that separates you, there are unique challenges and benefits that come with having both smaller and larger CCE partnership projects. Mindfully managing expectations, communicating thoroughly and openly, and being realistic about the resources you have available are important to addressing some of these challenges.

Being ‘community first’ means engaging and involving community partners at all stages of the partnership, even the application process. When the CFICE team was putting together its SSHRC application several years ago, the application process presented one of the first opportunities to put the ‘community first’ ethos into action.

With so many partners involved in CFICE, (at least a dozen universities and 60+ community-based organizations), finding a project design, structure, and common goals across the project posed a challenge, but over the course of the six years of this project, CFICE leaders have learned to put community first through practice.

CFICE spoke to its current Principal Investigator, Peter Andrée, and one of the community partners from the Poverty Reduction Hub, Liz Weaver of Tamarack Institute in Waterloo, to gain their insight into how best to formulate a SSHRC partnership grant application while respectfully involving your community-based organization (CBO) partners.

Sharing ideas at the Ottawa CCE Regional Roundtable.

Start with existing relationships

Before you can think about submitting a SSHRC partnership grant application, you need to know who your partners will be. In CFICE’s case, most community partnerships arose out of pre-existing relationships and networks. CFICE’s original Principal Investigator (PI) Ted Jackson approached the Tamarack Institute, for instance, because he already had a relationship with them from his work in the community development sector.

CFICE Principal Investigator, Peter Andree.

Peter AndrĂ©e, the current PI for CFICE, was originally involved in the project as the academic co-lead for the Community Food Security hub. Through his academic research on food security, AndrĂ©e had an established network of contacts in that field, and it was through this network that he recruited to be a part of CFICE. AndrĂ©e said in an interview that connecting with partners in the early stages of the project “was a bit of an organic process” involving the lead academics and the Canadian Alliance for Community Service Learning (CACSL) drawing on their networks.

While you might begin with relationships you’ve already built, that does not mean that those you first approach will necessarily be the right fit. “The question then becomes how much you can ask of [the community partner],” AndrĂ©e says. “It’s often about your networks, but then don’t take that relationship for granted…really try and figure out if this is going to be of value [for them] or not.”

Community partners are often asked to write letters of support in the context of a partnership grant application, but AndrĂ©e says this isn’t something you want to ask them for right away. “Rather, you first have to have a conversation about what would be in this for you, and what would be in this for me, and how can we make sure that your time is valued and how can this be reciprocal?” he says.

Those initial conversations, of which there might be several, are the key to hashing out things like the responsibilities involved in the project and the potential benefits for each partner. If it’s a SSHRC partnership grant you’re applying for, don’t forget that the project is a research project at the end of the day.

“While it can serve other ends for community organizations, it ultimately needs to be this knowledge generation, synthesis project, so if that is not of interest to them, then you have to have those conversations early on” in order to determine if the partnership will be a good fit, says AndrĂ©e.

Consult partners from the get-go

Liz Weaver, the Co-CEO of the community-based organization the , was a community co-lead in CFICE’s Poverty Reduction hub in Phase I of the project. She says CFICE helped the folks at the Tamarack Institute feel respected and included in the application process by involving them in the initial design of the project.

“I think what was really important was the whole notion of community-first,” Weaver told CFICE in a recent interview. For CFICE, “community-first” means fostering equitable partnerships to co-create knowledge that can then be applied to benefit the community context.

“I felt I was informed at every stage of how the process was moving forward
there were lots of emails back and forth with community partners about where the proposal was at,” Weaver said. Then, when the CFICE project got to the interview stage of the SSHRC proposal, community partners were invited to be a part of that process as well.

As a community partner outside of the academic sphere, Weaver said the SSHRC application itself can be a bit “daunting,” but that “the people at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ [University] were quite helpful in terms of navigating [that].”

Exchanging as much information as possible and providing assistance with the application process when needed can make your CBO feel included and involved without feeling overwhelmed.

Align shared goals

As part of those early conversations, ensuring that partners are on the same page as to the broader goals of the project, and what they hope to get out of the project for their individual organization or research, is an important step in ensuring that expectations are aligned.

“Some of what’s implicit in how we work needs to be made explicit, so that everybody understands the parameters that everybody’s working with,” says AndrĂ©e. For instance, if an academic partner is looking to get tenure in the next five years, “that’s got to be on the table,” AndrĂ©e says. “What do you need to get tenure? If that’s a certain number of publications, how does that fit in with what you’re planning to do with your community partners?” Expectations that might seem like they are outside of the partnership, but that could influence one’s involvement in the project, need to be acknowledged.

Weaver said “the group has to buy into the shared agenda” of the research project, and thought maybe that was something that was lacking within CFICE’s Phase I. “I think we circled around the shared agenda a lot, and then each of the hubs did their own thing,” she said.

Both Weaver and Andrée identified the need to be in partnership with an organization as a whole, rather than just one person within that organization.

“Chances are people who are still doing the work five years later are not the people who started, and so there needs to be an institutional commitment to the value of the work for that organization,” AndrĂ©e says.

And, if you do have organizational or institutional support, and you have aligned goals and expectations, Weaver adds that something else to consider is your partners’ state of readiness. “If you want [the project] to get off the ground quickly, then you want to have groups that have good relationships and people who make decisions relatively quickly,” she said.

Negotiate power and governance

Over the course of CFICE, face-to-face meetings have been found to be integral to the success of partnership projects. These meetings allow honest and frank discussions to take place and can be helpful to address more difficult topics such as power imbalances. Weaver says the first face-to-face meeting for all CFICE partners did not happen until after the funding was secured and the logistics and structure of the project was already in place. She suggests that in hindsight, this might have been done differently, so that the main ‘hub’ structure of the CFICE project could have been better communicated to community partners.

While Weaver said community partners might have been more involved in deciding the overall project structure, when it came to the individual hubs, “we were able—both community and academic—to make decisions fairly quickly with the design of that project.” Weaver said the independence that was afforded to the hubs, in her case the Poverty Reduction hub, was helpful to the community partners and allowed them to have a driving voice behind the work.

Identifying areas where community partners will take the lead in terms of decision making and governance, and outlining areas that fall into the academic purview is important to ensure power dynamics are addressed and relationships are as equitable as possible.

For instance, within the SSHRC partnership grant, the PI, an academic, is ultimately responsible for budgeting and management of funds. That means that they will hold a certain degree of power and governance in the project. It is important to acknowledge this role and how it may impact the partnership in the context of these early conversations.

Nicole Bedford, Project Manager and Communications Coordinator of the CFICE project, talks to us about some of the challenges CFICE has faced with respect to managing and channeling funding for the CFICE project. She highlights the usefulness of having dedicated project administrators to help resolve issues with respect to rules and policies surrounding the dispersal of funding, and she discusses a few ways CFICE has overcome some funding challenges.

Listen to our podcast or read the transcript below for more!

Community-Campus Engagement Funding: A Project Manager’s Perspective Podcast Transcript

[Music sound up]

Chelsea: This a Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement podcast.

Hello and my name is Chelsea. I’m really excited today, to introduce the 3rd segment in a series on Campus-Community Engagement funding, where we speak to people from community organizations, students and Project Administrators to get their perspectives on the ins and outs of CCE funding.

Project Administrators and Project Managers of Community-Campus Engagement partnerships can play key roles in addressing challenges that come along with project funding. Often, these folks are working hard to find solutions to the problems that come along with funding, such as spending restrictions set by the funder or the institution. It’s a job that takes both creativity and skill and we can learn a lot from their experience.

Originally, this last segment in this series was to feature Gen Harrison who is the Project Administrator with CFICE, but surprise, instead we’re sitting down with Project Manager Nicole Bedford who works closely with Gen on a day-to-day basis and has her own unique insight to offer.

[Music sound up]

Chelsea: Hi Nicole, as the Project Manager for CFICE what exactly is included in your role?

Nicole: So as the Project Manager for CFICE I have a lot of responsibilities, but the main one is to make sure that the project is functioning on its work timeline and within its budget. I rely very heavily on our Project Administrator to help with budgeting because our project is so large and then in the timeline aspect, I work with all the co-leads to build the timelines that they’re going to follow—and the co-leads being community and academic partners—so following the timelines that they’re going to work on for producing outputs or products or completing research and then I work with them to make sure that they’re meeting those timelines and that they have adequate support from our Secretariat to do that work.

Chelsea: Great. You said you rely a lot on Gen Harrison who is the Project Administrator. I’m wondering if you could tell us why is it important to set aside funding for an Administrator specifically?

Nicole: So for a project the size of CFICE, we have worked with over 60 different partners across the country and we even have some international partners that we work with. You need a Project Administrator. If I was responsible for doing all of the administration and that includes travel claims, payroll, budgeting—and our systems are complicated and difficult to use—if I had to do that all myself that would be a huge full-time job. So having a Project Administrator who knows the ins and outs of the university, who knows who to talk to, who knows what is required when, for example you’re submitting an invoice to CFICE to make sure that there is no push-back from our institution to say “Oh we can’t pay this for this reason”, it’s a huge asset to have with a project this size.

A lot of times Project Managers are responsible for both budgeting and work and timelines, but being able to share that role with a Project Administrator has meant that our research and our ability to complete research and knowledge mobilization products is that much more efficient…

…because we have a pro working on our financials and then being supported by my role—which is a project management role—in reviewing budgets and making sure we run budget committees and things like that, to support the work of administering the project.

Chelsea: In terms of kind of that more administrative and managerial work, where do the funding challenges lie for a CCE project?

Nicole: So I think the thing that makes a community-campus engagement project a little bit more complicated than your average community organization applying directly to a funder, getting directly funded by a funder, is that there are multiple stakeholders in a community-campus engagement project, all of whom have very different perspectives on what’s important to them, in terms of getting the project done.

So a community-campus engagement project from the CFICE perspective includes community organizations and leaders, academics, students, administrators —because administrators are also people who support community-campus engagement— so there’s a lot of different stakeholders and they have different desires in terms of how to spend the money. Especially when it comes to something like CFICE being funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), it means that we need to put our focus on things like research and supporting research and supporting training of research professionals (i.e students) and that spending is not always what everybody in the project, the community-campus engagement project, really wants to spend money on. So that is the first challenge when it comes to funding and using the funding for CCE projects. And then there are other challenges with respect to funding community-campus engagement work.

For example, power differentials in terms of funding and where the funding flows through. So in the SSHRC case, SSHRC puts the money into a university or an institution like a university and we’re the ones who have to channel the money into the community. We have to do that according to the rules of the Canadian Revenue Agency (CRA) and our institutions decide how those rules are interpreted according to the institution, to protect their liability. On top of that, we have to spend the money according to SSHRC as the granter.

So what they’re willing to spend money on, like I said before, they want to train highly qualified professionals—those are students—they want a large amount of money to be going towards a student. In community-campus engagement that is supposed to be community-first, that can look like it’s not community-first and having an academic be the end decision-maker, with respect to how that funding is allotted can also be a big barrier in terms of the power differentials for funding community-campus engagement that is community-first.

Chelsea: The CFICE project has been going on since 2012. What are some things that you’ve learned over that time, in order to address these challenges?

Nicole: So there are big challenges and there are little challenges with respect to funding. One of the things that I just talked about was the fact that power-differentials are a big deal in terms of decision making around the funding, so one of the things that CFICE has done, has been to create a budget committee and the budget committee has representatives from the community as well as academics and together they advise on the best choice in terms of how the funding is going to be spent.

Ultimately the final decision still lies with our Principal Investigator, but our Principal Investigator is invested in understanding what both community and academics want and acting on those, as long as it follows the rules that CRA puts around how to spend money and SSHRC puts around how to spend money and ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ puts around how to spend money. So that’s one of the ways that we have addressed the power-differentials to a certain extent and then there are little ways to address difficulties around funding.

So an example is with our travel and reimbursement processes here at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ University—and this is an institutional thing—is that we do not provide money in advance for travel. We don’t do travel advances. So what that means is that a community organization who wants to travel to a conference or a CFICE meeting or whatever, they have to put the money out up front and then CFICE reimburses them when they submit receipts. Well that can be a huge burden for a very small NGO or community organization that is participating who does not have the financial fluidity to be able to put that money upfront and wait a month to two months to get reimbursed.

So one of the things that we did was we worked with ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ University to give out travel bursaries. So travel bursaries allow us to grant a certain estimated amount of money—we estimate how much the travel is going to be—and then we give out that money as a bursary and the only caveat to that is now its income. It’s considered income to the community partner, which is a bit of an issue because then you have to declare it on your taxes, but it is one way we have gotten around the issue of waiting months to get reimbursed for travel when you don’t have that ability to put that on your credit card or whatever. And that goes for organizations as well as individuals because we’ve been able to give travel bursaries to individuals.

So there are a lot of different ways that you can work with your institution, to make sure that money is going to where it needs to go in your project…

…to support the research and the on the ground work in a community-first way, but it is a matter of spending time having those meetings with the right people and making sure that you’re still following the rules that are laid out by the funder and the government and things like that.

Chelsea: Thanks so much Nicole for joining us. Nicole Bedford is CFICE’s Project Manager, talking to us about her perspective on CCE funding.

[Sound up music]

This has been a CFICE podcast and the third part in a 3 part series on Community-Campus Engagement funding. My name is Chelsea Nash and thank you for listening!

For more information and insight on community-campus engagement, please visit our website where you can read the latest articles and also subscribe to our newsletter. So that you never miss out on the latest development in CCE. We’ll see you there!

Grant applications can be long and arduous processes, and can swallow a lot of your capacity and time, which is why it’s important to make sure the grant will suit your needs. Before applying for a grant like the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) Partnership Grant, first consider whether it’s the best fit for your organization, and for the goals of your partnership with Canadian academics. Having a funder that is aligned with your own mandate and priorities can make a world of difference to your project.

When the CFICE project started in 2012, it was one of the first multi-partner projects funded by SSHRC. Since then, some aspects of SSHRC’s structure and decision-making processes have evolved. Nonetheless, the CFICE project has valuable insight to offer others who might be considering engaging in a community-campus engagement (CCE) partnership and seeking funding through SSHRC. Here are some things to consider before applying for a SSHRC grant to help you determine whether it is the right grant for you.

What and who SSHRC funds

SSHRC’s primary mandate is “to promote and support post-secondary-based research and training in the humanities and social sciences.” Even when funding community-campus engagement (CCE) projects, supporting academic research, and training the next generation of researchers are SSHRC’s main functions. SSHRC does provide funding opportunities for partnerships via a suite of . These grants are not limited to community-campus partnerships, though such partnerships are certainly eligible. The majority of SSHRC funded partnerships involve not-for-profit organizations. SSHRC , “By fostering mutual co-operation and sharing of intellectual leadership, the grants allow partners to innovate, build institutional capacity and mobilize research knowledge in accessible ways.”

Funding challenges to consider

Governance structure

While SSHRC partnership funding can and does benefit both the academic and the community partner, given SSHRC’s primary mandate of advancing and supporting postsecondary-based research, the academic institution involved in the project is the one with over the use of the funds. This can create challenges for your partnership.

For SSHRC funded projects, the (academic) principal investigator on the project has the final say in any financial decisions, because they are the ones ultimately accountable for the funding. In the context of CFICE, this inability for community partners to have direct access to the funds highlighted explicit power dynamics between academic and community partners.

If you do apply for a SSHRC partnership grant, ensure that all partners are aware of the restrictions and constraints well in advance, as you do not want your community partner to end up feeling as though community needs and expertise are not valued, even though some aspects of the SSHRC grant may imply as much. (See here for more information on navigating power dynamics within CCE).

Ensure all partners are on the same page with respect to governance.

While CFICE was required to channel the SSHRC funding through ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ University due to the parameters of the grant, SSHRC does not stipulate any restrictions when it comes to governance of the project itself. In CFICE’s experience, incorporating co-governance via the inclusion of both community and academic perspectives as much as possible into the project helped to create an environment of respect for all partners. Co-governance was exercised in many decision making processes, including the existence of a budget committee which was composed of academic and community partners. And, the leadership on all projects was regularly shared by at least one academic partner and one community partner. CFICE found that ensuring community voices were heard at all levels of the project was an essential aspect of creating a community-first environment.

Capacity of all partners

Under SSHRC partnership grants, community partners are expected to contribute in-kind resources and time to the project. If the community partner is already strapped for resources, this could be a significant impediment to your partnership. One way to navigate this challenge could be to find as many ways as possible to bring down the costs of involvement for the community partner—for instance, employing embedded RAs to work with the community partner can increase their capacity, allowing them to contribute more time to the partnership. Also, having partners contribute in-kind resources that they already use and know well, such as webinar platform space, can ensure community partners help meet the project’s in-kind contribution requirements.

Navigating the bureaucracy associated with a SSHRC grant can also be a barrier to the success of your CCE partnership. When a CCE partnership is already working with limited capacity, the excess time and effort it can take to chase after reimbursements, for instance, can weigh down a project. To balance this, consider hiring a project administrator to keep track of funding requests, reimbursement requests, and the flow of other funds.

It is also important to make sure that partners fully understand all “capacity-enhancing” opportunities within SSHRC funding. For example, CFICE found that helping partners take advantage of the “salary research allowance,” was regularly complicated and difficult to implement. SSHRC’s salary research allowance provides funds for community partners to hire replacements for themselves within their community organization, therefore allowing the partner (not the hiree) to dedicate their own time to the research project. CFICE’s community partners, particularly the smaller organizations, found the work it took to hire and train a replacement for themselves to be restrictive, particularly if there was only a limited amount of funding available for that partner (e.g. under $10,000/year). Considering the best way to effectively reimburse the community partner is an important aspect of deciding which fund is best suited for your needs.

Fully understand the opportunities and challenges with capacity enhancing components of your grant.

Project size

SSHRC funds partnerships of all sizes. Your partnership could consist of one academic and one community partner, or it could include many of each. The CFICE project, for instance, was one of the first of its size to receive SSHRC funding, with five different hubs and multiple partners within each hub. As long as the size of your project is justified in your application and feasible within the parameters of the grant, the size of the partnership is entirely up to the team.

In CFICE’s case, the sheer size and complexity of the project became a challenge. Spreading resources across multiple partners led to issues of resources being spread too thin. CFICE was able to maximize its funding across a wide array of projects and partners, but partners regularly commented that funding was not adequate for fostering long-term, in-depth partnerships. Limited funding for each community partner also led to the problems identified with the salary research allowance discussed above.

Ensuring that the size of your project is realistic with the funds available is important, particularly taking into account any variables that could arise over time, such as personnel changes, unexpected costs associated with travel or meeting space, etc.

Get to know the ins and outs of SSHRC before you apply

At their core, SSHRC partnership grants operate with the goal of supporting academic research, as this is what SSHRC is mandated to support through its government funding. While it is possible to function in a community-first way with SSHRC funding, it’s important to consider the potential challenges for community partners in advance of applying for the grant to decide if it’s the best source of funding for your partnership.

Reviewing the restrictions and constraints of any funds you might be considering, and involving all partners in those discussions, will give you a better idea of the challenges you might encounter should you receive that funding.

Magda Goemans and Anna Przednowek, two long-time CFICE research assistants, talk to CFICE about how continuous Community-Campus Engagement funding has impacted their experiences. Both speak to how continuous funding allowed them to immerse themselves in the community work, to make connections for future careers, and to strengthen their own activism.

That said, funding can sometimes be fraught with different tensions, like when they find themselves in a room with community partners who may not be getting compensated in the same way the RA’s are.

Listen to our podcast or read the transcript below for more!

Community-Campus Engagement Funding: A Student Perspective Podcast Transcript

Chelsea: Hello, and thank you for joining us. This is a Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) podcast. My name is Chelsea and I am really excited to introduce this series on Campus-Community Engagement Funding, where we sit down with people from community organizations, students, and administrators, to get their perspectives on the ins and outs of CCE funding.

It’s important to remember that it’s not just academics and community leaders involved in campus-community engagement. Students can often be the backbone of a community-campus partnership. Today we’re joined by two people who have worked with CFICE as students for a number of years. I’d like to welcome Magda Goemans and Anna Przednowek.

So, Magda, let’s start with you. I’m hoping you can tell me a bit about your roles with the CFICE project.

Magda: So I’ve been an RA with CFICE for about 5 years now, and I’ve taken on two very different roles. So the first year I was an RA, I worked directly with a community partner within the Community Environmental Sustainability hub. It was a really amazing experience I had with that community partner; they were called Sustainable Living Ottawa East. They have been advocating for more sustainable measures in a redevelopment project occurring in their neighbourhood. So that gave me a lot of opportunities to learn about their work and hopefully assist with their work. And then the last two years, I’ve been working as an RA with the evaluation and analysis working group. Through that, we’ve had a really good opportunity to look at what we’ve learned from the first phase of CFICE and I’ve been helping along in gathering those learnings, analyzing, and hopefully putting out some useful outputs that have really helped us on different themes to better understand from our contexts.

Chelsea: Okay, and how about you Anna?

Anna: So I have been involved with CFICE since 2015, for the first couple of years and still continuing now, I’m the coordinating research assistant for the Violence Against Women hub and working with Diana Majury the academic lead, and then some really amazing activists in the field of anti-Violence Against Women across Canada, and on demonstration projects with them. So more recently I have become the RA as well, transitioning into the Community Campus Engage Canada (CCEC) position, and here we’re looking at aligning the different institutions such as funders, non-government organizations, and academic institutions.

Chelsea: Moving on to the topic of funding, I’m wondering what each of you have learned about campus-community engagement funding during your time with CFICE. So, back to you Magda.

Magda: Well I feel like I’ve learned a lot about funding, just from my own personal experience and through some of the work that we’ve been doing in terms of the analysis of our learnings from the first phase of CFICE. One of the big things I’ve found, which is so obvious, is that funding is so crucial to advancing community-campus engagement on so many levels and in so many different ways. Obviously as a student, I’ve been able to understand that from that perspective. I’ve also spent a lot of time as a student looking at the experiences of community partners, and from my vantage point, hopefully understanding a bit of their perspective as well. On this broader level, access or lack of access to funding, for CCE, that often reflects power relations between institutions and community members, faculty, students, that kind of thing. Ease of access to funding helps to demonstrate respect for community partners. We’ve seen that time and time again. Whereas in the opposite situation, where there are barriers to funding, administrative hurdles, if there’s just this huge time lag in terms of getting funding, that tends to
give the appearance of devaluing community research, which is of course the last thing institutions would want to do.

From my own perspective, I’ve found that longer term funding as well makes such an impact on communities and as a student, on students as well. That continuous funding, knowing it’s there for several years, has added such stability to my day-to-day work as a student, and as students we’re always balancing our schoolwork, our studies, potential teaching, other things going on, family life, and having that financial stability of an RAship has made a huge difference for me.

One other thing I’ll just mention is, going back to what I was just talking about in terms of funding being related to power and different opportunities. I have been aware of that, particularly in the first three years of my RAship, when I would sit in a room with community members, directly working with them, and I did have moments of discomfort, thinking, ‘I’m being paid for all the time I’m spending here, and the people around me are not necessarily receiving the resources that they need for administrative work, perhaps attending meetings, things like that.’ So that’s been my experience in general.

Magda Goemans facilitates a session at CFICE’s January symposium.

Chelsea: And what about you, Anna, do you have similar experiences in that way?

…our community partners felt like they were building capacity within their own communities and their own advocacy in communities through supporting students that had a similar agenda. They saw this as students taking on future work within their own communities.

Anna: Funding can be a benefit and a point of tension, as Magda had previously talked about. So in terms of the benefit, the projects that we had funded are probably projects that agencies typically wouldn’t have been able to fund themselves or wouldn’t be able to tackle in their every day front-line work, especially in the Violence Against Women [field] because some of the resources that agencies have are so stretched, so it’s been kind of a nice thing to be able to step in and contribute and support the work that community partners have been doing. But certainly a point of tension as Magda has mentioned as well, has been listening to some of our community partners and also evaluating some of the data that Magda had talked about in Community Campus Engagement and putting community needs first, is that for example research assistants might be getting paid more for doing their research assistant hours than community partners getting paid for doing their expertise level work as a community partner. So as a student, that’s been a huge learning curve and a huge point of learning for me, to have that ethical approach to Community Campus Engagement, especially when it comes to funding.

Certainly getting reimbursed is something that has been a point of tension as well, as Magda had alluded to. Being respectful to community partners and ensuring that they get reimbursed for participating and contributing their time and resources, etc., in a timely manner. I think the other piece I found that was really kind of exciting about us was our research assistants in the Violence Against Women hub have been predominantly handpicked by the community partners as well, so I thought that was a really interesting thing. Even though community partners didn’t hold the funding per se, they still had a choice and autonomy in choosing the people they wanted to work with which I think was really important. Quite often they were people who shared identity or shared ideas of activism, so that was something that was of great importance and of great interest as well.

And also, our community partners felt like they were building capacity within their own communities and their own advocacy in communities through supporting students that had a similar agenda. They saw this as students taking on future work within their own communities.

Anna Przednowek presents on CFICE Violence Against Women research at C2UExpo 2017.

Chelsea: I think we’ve kind of touched on this a little bit, but I’m wondering, from the student perspective, what does CCE funding more broadly mean to you? What’s it’s significance?

Working in this kind of a community-campus partnership environment has definitely provided me not only with some new experiences, but with some connections to potentially future research or future career opportunities…

Magda: Well I have to say being funded as an RA and doing CCE work, this has been an incredible opportunity as a research assistant. I’ve literally gone beyond the office, beyond the classroom, and I believe I’ve had opportunities through this funding that I otherwise would not have had. Also, being an RA working in a CCE environment has exposed me to many people I would not have talked to otherwise. We know as students, particularly PhD students, we tend to go in our little caves, and work in isolation. Working in this kind of a community-campus partnership environment has definitely provided me not only with some new experiences, but with some connections to potentially future research or future career opportunities, etc. Just as I was mentioning before, that continuous funding has supported that. I’ve been able to maintain a momentum in my connections with people and a momentum on the projects I’m working on, without having to cut things short within short pieces of time.

Anna: I think similarly for me, it is the continuity and the opportunity to immerse myself in community-campus engagement. As a practicing social worker, I come from a community background, so it was actually really interesting for me to be on the academic side of this partnership, because typically I would be the community person who would be involved in these campus-community engagements. But one of the things funding certainly has provided is the opportunity to immerse myself, which I probably wouldn’t have had if I was working a full-time or part-time job off campus to fund myself through my education, and also trying to pick up and do the community-campus engagement as a volunteer or a side-on. I think what this has provided me with a really amazing opportunity to be able to immerse myself in that community and work more closely with both academic and community partners and getting to know the academic piece of it as well, which I think is really interesting for someone who’s interested in working in academia in the future. I also found this was a mentoring experience, that when I do end up working in academia, this was sort of like three years of mentoring experience that I got, of how to do better, how to do well, how to do a community-first Community Campus Engagement, which I think that part is invaluable. But I’m glad it came with funding.

Chelsea: That’s great, thank you both so much Magda and Anna. It was great to hear both of your perspectives. This has been a Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) on campus-community engagement funding. Please join us next time to hear from an administrative perspective on CCE funding. We’ll be hearing from Genevieve Harrison, the administrative guru with the CFICE project right here at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ.

Talk to you then!

In this podcast, we sit down with Jim Blake, the Community Co-lead of CFICE’s Student Pathways working group. Jim shares his experience with community-campus funding, including the challenges that come with funding laden with academic language, managing the expectations from a variety of different funding sources, and how sometimes funder’s expectations don’t line up with what’s feasible in a small community organization. Listen to our podcast or read the transcript below for more!

Community-Campus Engagement Funding: A Community Perspective Podcast Transcript

[Music begins]

Chelsea: Hello, and thank you for joining us. This is a Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) podcast. My name is Chelsea and I am really excited to introduce this series on Campus-Community Engagement Funding, where we sit down with people from community organizations, students, and administrators, to get their perspectives on the ins and outs of CCE funding.

We’re here with Jim Blake to get his perspective on Campus-Community Engagement funding. Jim is the Community Co-lead of the Student Pathways working group, and has been with the CFICE project since the end of 2017. Thanks for joining us, Jim.

The first question I’m hoping to ask you is what do you wish you’d known about funding before participating on a CCE grant project like CFICE.

Jim: I guess I’ve spent the last 25 years finding funding in the community so that we can do community-based research in relationship with the university. So our organization is an independent organization which manages the relationship between the community that has questions it wants answered, and the university and the professors and students who want to do research in the community. So the structure of the funding that came through CFICE is all organized, as many things are through SSHRC, in a very academic way, with academic language. You know, we’re going to take this person’s time, and it’s going to get back-filled by this, or whatever. That kind of stuff just does not happen in a small not-for-profit organization. Basically, you’ve got people, and if you’re going to use more of their resources, then you need funding to be able to make that happen. So, after lots of conversations, and a very understanding co-lead at the university, and working with the folks in CFICE, we figured it out and made it happen. I must say it was quite
convoluted and confusing. But that’s just from a community perspective. And the way that universities do their funding is very different from the way that community organizations do their funding. We get some funding from Trent University to be able to do our work, and the rest of the money comes from the community. And, with the university basically we have a memorandum of understanding, they’ll provide a certain amount of money, and we in turn will do x y and z, engage so many students, have so many community projects, those kinds of things. Once we get that MOU done, it’s a very simple process, to be able to do that.

Chelsea: In your experience, what do you find is similar and what do you find is different between community project funding on its own and then the campus-community partnership funding for community partners. Like you said, there was a lot of academic language and those sorts of things, is that a main difference?

Jim: I look at all funding in the same way. Some funding comes with expectations, and other funding is just
somebody makes a donation, so they don’t have the same expectations and you aren’t writing reports and delivering outcomes and those kinds of things. There’s a whole spectrum of things that need to be done and need to be delivered. I think as long as the funder has an understanding of the capacity of the organization that it’s funding, and it’s not too convoluted, then I don’t really see that much difference.

One of the wonderful things about the funding through this program is that it has allowed us to have master’s students embedded in the community, so embedded RAships in the community for a number of years. That has made a world of difference in the kind of research we are able to do in our community.

Chelsea: What’s a funding challenge that you’ve experienced in a CCE partnership, and how did you overcome it?

ŽłŸ±łŸ:ÌęThe funding challenge was that funding would come to our organization, the idea being that they would buy hours of our staff, and then those hours would be back-fllled by someone else. But when you have a small community, you only have two staff, you can’t bring in somebody to back-fill four hours. It just doesn’t work. It probably works in a university or academia, where those hours are allocated to someone else. You know professors work that way, and so their teaching load is lowered and their research load is increased and somebody else takes a
it just does not work in a small organization. There is very little opportunity for back-filling. My thinking is the whole idea of community engagement, is that if you really want to engage not-for-profit organizations, you’ve got to look at how they actually operate: How they fund their programs; what is it you want to accomplish; and what’s the best way to do that. And we’ve been able to figure that out after having conversations. It’s actually all great. One of the wonderful things about the funding through this program is that it has allowed us to have master’s students embedded in the community, so embedded RAships in the community for a number of years. That has made a world of difference in the kind of research we are able to do in our community. So having that kind of funding, and then through that, we’ve been able to get matching funding from community organizations to be able to do that. So that flexibility to make that happen and get access to that incredible resource on an ongoing basis is extraordinary.

…in terms of [having] the funding be as effective as possible, if the idea is to have organizations community-engaged and [doing] community-engaged research, you’re going to make the funding model as simple as possible so the organization can spend its time doing its work, instead of reporting on the money.

Chelsea: Is there anything else you’d like to add about funding from a community organization’s perspective, in your experience?

Jim: Our organization, our role is to be that broker in the community. It’s not an easily fund-able program. Research organizations aren’t necessarily, it’s not that easy to go to the community and say, ‘will you donate money to a research organization?’ So, it’s a constant challenge finding all the little pieces of funding to be able to put all that together in one package and make that work. So sometimes we’re maybe dealing with 10 different funding streams and having to report out on all of those things. So my thoughts in terms of to have the funding be as effective as possible, if the idea is to have organizations community-engaged and community-engaged research, you’re going to make the funding model as simple as possible so the organization can spend its time doing its work, instead of reporting on the money.

Chelsea: Thanks for sharing your perspective, Jim. Definitely a lot to think about. This has been a Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement Podcast, where we talk about Campus-Community Engagement funding. We have two more instalments in this series coming up, where we hear from students who have worked with the CFICE project for a long time, and one of the administrators of the CFICE project, who’s had a big role in the funding of this multi-year project.

Talk to you then.

In CFICE’s “Conversations With” series, we interview community-campus engagement (CCE) practitioners to get their insights on CCE. Interview conducted by Chelsea Nash, CFICE Communications Research Assistant.

Lee RoseÌęis a curious social innovator with an knack for working across systems to drive change. He led the creation and development of the Community Knowledge Exchange while working as the Director of Community Knowledge at Community Foundations of Canada, and now serves as its founding Managing Director. In this piece, Lee ponders the power dynamics between funders and grantees with us and shares his thoughts on how we can start shifting our focus to asset-based funding.

What is your background in community funding?

I kind of fell into philanthropy. If you asked 10-year-old me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I can guarantee that I’d never have said “I’m going to be a director at a national network of community foundations.” I think, like most people who are working in the social change space, my journey to where I am is thanks in large part to serendipity and a curiosity about finding meaningful ways to do good, better.

I started my work at Community Foundations of Canada (CFC) about four years ago. I’ve also sat on boards of charities – both national and local – and now lead the work of the Community Knowledge Exchange, a social change agency that recently spun out of being a project of CFC.

When I started working at CFC, it was the first real time that I was on the “other side” of the sector – working for a network of funders, instead of being connected to the work on the grantee side of things. I remember in my first few months at CFC that I noticed that people were being really really nice to me at conferences. While waiting in line for lunch at one such conference, an established leader from a large private foundation leaned toward me and chided, “they’re only being nice because the word foundation is on your lanyard.” And here I thought they were talking to me because I was a nice guy.

Over the course of my tenure at CFC, I began to get a better understanding of the awkwardness of the grantor-grantee relationship. Patterns of power and control. Who gets to decide what’s an important issue to fund? I began asking myself some tough questions – slaying a few sacred cows in the process. Do donors and funders really know best? Do grant review teams made up of mostly people with privilege and largely devoid of those “end users” who have “services delivered upon them” really make sense? Why do foundations hoard money in large endowments? Who really has the power?

I’ve always been a bit skeptical of funders who have stated priority areas – not because that’s a bad idea – focus and commitment are good things! More because I’m curious about how they identified them. Is it on the whim of a donor, or are they in response to actual community needs? I really need to understand how they got to those priorities and what’s the research behind that.

Also, funders are terrible at burdening grantees with so much process and paperwork in the application process. Just getting all the paperwork together is a massive undertaking – the prize isn’t effecting change in your community, it’s making sure you got all your financial statements, partnership letters and budget spreadsheets uploaded before an arbitrary deadline. Congratulations! You won. Now please wait 4 to 6 weeks for us to review your application and politely decline it. There has to be a better way!

Lee Rose speaks at the Ottawa Impact Hub. Photo by Mike Gifford, 2017.

You have spoken before about flipping funding on its head, and instead of having community organizations apply to funders, having funders apply to community organizations to compete to fund them. Could you tell me a little more about that?

I actually just said it as a joke in a moment of frustration when I was applying for funding for a project. Like this is an excellent idea – I should be the one taking applications from funders who want to get behind it. Imagine sending a decline letter to a potential funder saying “We received your application to fund our project, but unfortunately we are not in a position to accept your funding because {insert polite reason for decline here}. Wouldn’t that be liberating? Imagine the shift in power, the reframe that’s possible when you flip the proverbial iceberg and take an asset-based approach. So instead of starting from the position of having to wait for funding, start from something like “I’ve got a really cool idea. ‘I’m going to invite six funders to apply for this and I’m going to select which funder’s going to work with me.”

It’s a fundamental shift in mindset, right?

Do you think it’s possible to make such a big shift, practically speaking?Ìę

I’m hopeful. And I’m starting to see it happen in my own work at the Community Knowledge Exchange (CKX). When you think about it – it’s all about power and permission. Why do I need to wait for a funder to grant me permission to do something? Can I get going on my own? I recognize that it’s not always possible – but you don’t always need to wait for permission to get going. I tend to take the position that we’re moving ahead with a project or initiative that we believe in, and rather than ask a funder to support it, I’ll invite them to come along because they’ll also see the value in what we’re doing. It’s also an interesting way to bring multiple funding partners together.

Again I think the biggest barrier to making this shift is that we’re stuck in this waiting for permission mindset. We need to break the cycle. And while I realize that flipping the entire machine that is the current funding model by tomorrow is a tad unrealistic – getting people to realize that their social change work is actually more important than waiting for a grant proposal is the first step.

At the CFICE January 2017 evaluation symposium.

What do you think the biggest barriers are now to achieving that kind of dynamic?

I think it’s people being stuck in entrenched and inflexible systems who are stuck in old ways of doing things, and are more interested in maintaining the status quo than actually achieving social change. So I’m thinking of funders who require grantees to estimate how many pens they’re going to use in Q3 of year two of a three-year project in order to get the funding, and are really resistant to any changes or emergent learning that happen along the way. And I also think of grantees who can’t imagine that they actually have the capacity to do stuff because they’re so used to working in a system that suffocates them and restricts their sense of agency to ‘you must get funder approval’ to do stuff. So that’s it. People and patterns.

But there is hope, and here’s an example of an entrenched system actually able to adapt and respond to create change: The way that the Government of Canada was able to mobilize to resettle 30,000 Syrian refugees in Canada in less than six months. That required massive systemic reaction and responses to something. So the prime minister says ‘we’re going to welcome 30,000 people,’ and it was impossible. Everyone said it was impossible, and everyone said it’s not going to happen, we’re not going to be able to do it. But the call to action and the moment in time were so important, and people and systems responded in a way that made it happen.

But more often than not, this isn’t what happens. It’s why that same government hasn’t yet brought clean water to every Indigenous community in Canada. The need is as great, if not greater – it’s a devastating challenge that we’ve been trying to address for a very long time. Why haven’t we gotten that figured out and done yet? People and patterns.

You’ve spoken about the power dynamics that exist now. If we were able to have funders applying to community organizations, how do you think the power dynamics would look?

I think, in that case, imagine you as an organization could pick a funder that aligns with your values and trusts your judgment to do things and your capacity to actually achieve the things that you’re setting out to do versus, having to report on arbitrary metrics that aren’t actually metrics and that aren’t actually showing a demonstrable impact. And this isn’t a generalization of all funders, because I think there are progressive funders who are doing really cool stuff.

It’s also about building a culture of experimentation and being able to admit that neither the funder or the grantees has all the answers. That’s a big power shift on both sides.

This kind of experimentation happens all the time in the private sector. Companies spend a lot of money in research and development and designing products that never see the light of day – there’s a culture of R&D and investing in trial and error that just doesn’t exist in the social change sector. Part of it is because we can’t really take chances with people’s lives, there’s that human element. But, I think that there is room for funders to loosen the slack, to trust organizations. You’re on the ground in your community, you know what’s best. And we’re just going to trust, and you’re going to let us know, and we’ll learn along the way, and maybe next time we’ll do things differently.

Do you think the power dynamic could ever swing too far the other way?

The pendulum has been so far in the funders court for so long, that I think even just a shift back toward the center would be interesting, don’t you?

Working with an institution as large as a university can be a daunting, challenging task filled with moving parts and bureaucratic hoops to jump through.

For a community organization, tackling the challenges that come with a partnership with a post-secondary institution can be time-consuming, particularly if it’s relatively new territory. This is where administrators—experts in things like financial reporting and institutional coordination—come in.

In CFICE’s first four years, administrative duties were found to be a bit of a burden, particularly for community partners, who are often already stretched thin for time. In the Violence Against Women hub, for instance, the academic co-lead took on an administrative role so that the community partner could have more time and energy for hub projects. “As a senior academic, the academic co-lead was less vulnerable to academic publishing pressures and thus able to take over these kinds of duties without jeopardizing her career,” the year 4 summary report reads.

While that division of duties worked in some ways, there were also challenges. Community partners at times felt that the academic co-lead had more control over things like drafting and soliciting proposals. “It does require trust and it does require consultation and comfort with handing over that responsibility to someone else,” a community partner said.

Hiring a professional administrator to handle the ins and outs of funding applications, university bureaucracy, and to advocate for the project can provide an opportunity for capacity building for both community and academic partners.

Genevieve Harrison is CFICE’s Project Administrator.

Having an administrator on your team “is more important when you’re dealing with an institution, because each department in an institution is a separate entity, and a separate landscape,” says Genevieve Harrison, the administrator for the CFICE project. Administrators have “the ability to tie those things together” and to “keep communication going,” Harrison said.

In addition to her role as the CFICE Project Administrator, Harrison wears many other administrative hats, including being the administrator for the ĐÓ°ÉÔ­ŽŽ Centre for Community Innovation, (which houses the CFICE project).

Harrison uses her skills to:

• Ensure CFICE is in compliance with the funder
• Handle financial reporting
• Co-ordinate between institutions
• Handle all project HR needs.

Needless to say, the CFICE project would not be where it is today without her involvement.

Harrison, who is well-versed in the requirements of both the university and of the project funder, says the most important function of her position is “ensuring the project team has the best information for decision making. There’s a lot of moving parts in the project, and making sure that people are up to date with what is happening financially can help them make decisions,” she told CFICE.

In addition to navigating bureaucracy and policy, a good administrator approaches a project with flexibility, patience, empathy and diplomacy.

“You’re in the middle dealing with people who have problems, and people who you’re trying to help resolve their issues. You’re sort of like the broker in that sense,” Harrison said. “It’s important to understand the constraints and limitations that people are dealing with” in order to best help them, she added.

While a good administrator can benefit a project’s capacity building, decision making, and general organization, project leaders can also take steps to effectively work with the administrator, maximizing her skills to the best of their ability.

Harrison says one important way to do this is to remember to involve your administrator early on in discussions, and to always advise them of what your plans are. That way, the administrator has the opportunity to guide the project leaders through the system, rather than trying to problem solve when it might already be too late.

“I think it’s important to remember that the administrator is on their side and that the administrator works for the project. I think there’s the perception that sometimes the administrator works for the university,” Harrison says, often because the administrator is put into the position of advising on what restrictions or limitations a project must adhere to, per university or funder policy, for instance.

But, while administrators cannot change the policies, they are experts in problem solving.

“One of the key principles that I try to keep in mind, is the attitude of ‘how can we do this?’ Quite often when dealing with an institution the answers are ‘you can’t do that.’ So finding a way to do things is really important,” Harrison adds.

While hiring an administrator might seem like an added cost to your project, they really can save time, resources, and add to your capacity in the community.

Try building in the cost of an administrator into your funding proposal to begin with. Once you’ve had an administrator working with you, you’ll wonder how you ever managed without!

Post-secondary institutions have specific timelines, long processes for things like ethics approval or grant applications, and generally speaking, a complex power structure that can involve some firm top-down governance.

These factors can easily complicate a campus-community partnership, particularly if the community partner is unsure or unfamiliar with how the academic environment functions. In CFICE’s year four summary reports, community partners from multiple hubs expressed their frustration with the “mismatched timelines between academic and community partnerships.”

Charles Levkoe, an academic co-lead with the CFICE project, said that his community counterpart often talked about how everything changed once they understood how the academic cycle worked.

It’s important for academic and community partners to be on the same page as much as possible in order to ensure an effective and fruitful partnership. For community organizations who have limited experience working with academic institutions, here are some things to expect when entering a partnership with a post-secondary institution.

First steps when working with a post-secondary institution

Dr. Charles Levkoe, academic co-lead with the CFICE project.

For those that have never partnered with an academic institution before and are completely unsure of what to expect, Dr. Levkoe suggests finding a broker organization as a first step. Broker organizations can sometimes be housed within post-secondary institutions themselves, and it is their job to be well-connected with the institution and with community organizations.

Additionally, ensuring that your community organization finds the right person or people to work with is all about doing the research ahead of time, something Dr. Levkoe said a broker organization can be really helpful with.Ìę

However, if you have your own relationships with people within a post-secondary institution, it might be best to start there instead. “A lot of the best community-campus engagement work I’ve seen goes through people,” Dr. Levkoe said. “They know how I work, I know how they work, we have a trust that’s built up. And those things don’t come overnight,” he added.

Similarly, CFICE’s year four summary reports echoed the importance of previously existing personal relationships as being important building blocks for any partnership.

Have realistic expectations about timelines

One academic partner in CFICE’s Violence Against Women hub said that often, community organizations have “fairly unrealistic views of how quickly it can happen
They don’t know how long it takes to get ethics approval and they are frustrated by the delays. From their point of view it is just ‘why don’t you just get on with [it] and just do it!” The academic partner here echoed concerns of a “timeline mismatch” between the community and academic partners, but also acknowledged the unique time limitations that community partners experience, where “people are so busy, so overwhelmed” that the slow pace of academic research “makes them less interested in the actual research.”

Figuring out expectations and timelines are part of any good project.

When discussing how community partners can manage their expectations when entering into a partnership with an academic institution, Dr. Levkoe said that understanding the university structure is a good place to start.

“The university can be a very top-down institution that has a certain way of doing things. Faculty have some freedom within that structure but most are already involved in a range of work. For example, if someone asked me to do research with them, even if I love the project, I have classes I teach, I have students I’m supervising and it’s not something I can easily add to my plate. I need to plan ahead, I need to make time, make space, sometimes I need to apply for grants, and that can take up to a year.”

Academic timelines and community-campus engagement (CCE) projects

In most universities, the academic timeline consists of two main semesters of teaching, the first being from September through December, and the second from January through the end of May. Often, academics have more time to conduct research, or participate in CCE projects, during the summer months, when their teaching schedule is much less demanding.

There are additional factors in academic timing that could impact when a grad student is hired for a research assistantship, for instance. And when it comes to sharing CCE project work, academic articles undergo a peer review process that makes publishing a lengthy process—often up to two years of editing and revising before an article makes it to print.

Exactly how these timelines could impact a project will vary depending on the institution and the academic partner, but being aware of the possibility that this four-month semester schedule could affect the flow and speed of a project can help to manage expectations.

Ethics = longer CCE timelines but enhance research quality

All projects are beholden to the project management triple constraint triangle. Projects can only adhere to two sides of the triangle at any given time.

What is ultimately important to remember is that the reason a lot of things move slowly through academia is because there are high standards of rigor and ethics.

“I think ethics is a good thing,” Dr. Levkoe said. “It’s not perfect; there’s lots of challenges
but it helps to ensure there are checks and balances”.

As someone who has also worked in the non-profit sector for many years, Dr. Levkoe said in that sector, “you write a grant, you often find out relatively quickly [if you were successful], and then the program goes ahead or it doesn’t. But academia works a bit differently.”

One way to effectively manage expectations is through outlining limitations and potential restrictions right off the bat. Partners in the Violence Against Women hub said that the first step in the partnership needed to be coming to a consensus about the structure, process, and goals for the hub. In this particular instance, because the CFICE project is funded by SSHRC, there were certain guidelines and pre-determined parameters on the process of the project that needed to be met. Clearly identifying these factors in advance was important to the community partners in this hub.

Community organizations partnering with an academic institution should keep in mind that depending on where the grant or funding is coming from, asking questions and having a clear idea of any limitations the grant might have on the project can be very helpful to do in advance.

Partnerships often extend beyond the ‘community-campus’ dichotomy

The Food Secure Canada team poses for a picture. ©Abra Brynne

“We have to be careful about talking about communities and academics as being two separate things,”ÌęDr. Levkoe said. “As academics, we are also community members.”

He said his engagement with the community involves sitting on boards, working with organizations “not necessarily as part of my research program, but as part of my service to the community, as part of my application of the stuff I’m reading and writing.” And, often times, he said he is the one who approaches community organizations to engage in a partnership.

“This relationship is really dynamic and evolving, it’s not straight forward at all,” Dr. Levkoe said. But being “realistic about what can happen” is a good place to start.

Co-op placements and internships, some unpaid, have long been the only way for many university students to put what they’re learning in classrooms into practice. These opportunities provide students with the chance to do a sort of taste-test of their chosen career path before graduation. If they enjoy their experience, they are all the more prepared for graduation and entry into the workforce, having made valuable connections and laid the foundation for a professional network.

This workforce preparation is why in June 2016, a ‘highly skilled workforce expert panel’ put together under the direction of then-premier Kathleen Wynne, that all postsecondary students engage in at least one work-integrated learning (WIL) opportunity before graduation. In an effort to make new graduates more employable in their fields, the panel recommended that all students be required to participate in things like co-op placements, internships, practicums, field education and community service-learning, all of which fall under the umbrella of work-integrated learning.

Whether or not work-integrated learning becomes a focus for premier-elect Doug Ford remains to be seen, however, the national trend points to an increase in these experiences for students, with the 2017 federal budget that the Canadian government will help fund 60,000 paid student work placements over five years. And, according to an article in , both the New Brunswick and Nova Scotia governments have also considered how to integrate more experiential learning opportunities for postsecondary students.

“When Canadian students get on-the-job education, they’re getting the experience they need to succeed,” said Patty Hajdu, the federal Minister of Employment, Workforce Development and Labour in a .

While work experience in their field can add value to a student’s education and to their resume, finding placements for the more than two million post-secondary students in Ontario comes with its own challenges for both faculty and employers. CFICE has put together a brief list of what faculty, community organizations, and students should expect from this new provincial policy. Much of this information is based on 2012 surveys conducted by the Higher Education Quality Council of Ontario, in which employers, students, and faculty were surveyed.

What faculty can expect

• Additions to your workload
  • Incorporating work-integrated learning (WIL) into course requirements will require a lot of time and resources for matching employers with their students, for instance. As reported by academic faculty with experience in coordinating WIL experiences, finding enough placements is one thing, but finding quality placements where students can thrive is another. found that “half of faculty respondents who taught a course with a WIL component reported performing 11 or more” tasks in addition to their typical duties per term.
• Balancing course expectations with WIL timelines
  • This pertains primarily to those faculty who will be incorporating WIL into their courses, or, who might have students who are engaged in WIL while simultaneously enrolled in their course. The report mentioned above found that students often struggle with time management when engaged in WIL experiences, and the demands of an academic semester can sometimes clash. Further, managing WIL placements with large class sizes can be additionally challenging.
• Establishing your own connections to the community
  • Through the organization of WIL opportunities for students, faculty can learn more about the work going on in their own community, and perhaps lay the foundation for a more involved relationship with industry players in their field. This could result in something as simple as having access to relevant guest speakers to attend your classes for the benefit of students.

What community organizations can expect

• An influx in requests for placements
  • With this new mandate, post-secondary institutions will likely be on the hunt for partners in the community sector and elsewhere to place students. Don’t forget that in this situation, the institution’s objective is to ensure students fulfill their learning requirements. But, with planning and effective communication both with the student and with the liaison at the institution, community organizations can put the extra capacity to good use.
• Trained and engaged new-hires
  • After the placement has come to an end and the student(s) has graduated, the community organization may have the opportunity to continue its relationship with the student, who is already familiar with the work, the organization, and can start their job further ahead than a brand new person would. Of course, this may be challenging for smaller community organizations with lower budgets, however, even if the student does not continue their work with your organization, you may still have a relationship with someone in the field who has developed an interest in the work your organization is doing. Perhaps the student goes into academia—down the road you will have an existing relationship with a researcher, something that could flourish into a community-campus partnership.
• Developing closer relationships with institutions
  • When post-secondary institutions reach out to your organization to arrange WIL for their students, it could be the first time they are encountering the work that you do. Establishing a relationship with the institution could lead to a future partnership, which could mean future funding and collaborative research.
• Managing short-term and special projects
  • Students engaged in WIL are short-term. For any organization, it could be a challenge to find sufficient work for these students to do without the additional work of having to manage them. Being creative with what students are assigned, and engaging them in short-term projects can be an effective capacity builder for your organization.

What students can expect

• Different types of Work-Integrated Learning
  • Fulfilling a WIL requirement can take many forms, including a co-op placement, an internship, an apprenticeship, a clinical placement, experiential course learning, a field placement, community-service learning, or an applied research project. What type of WIL you experience will be dependent on your program, courses, or the availability of options at your post-secondary institution. You may have the opportunity to engage in more than one of the above experiences.

The Benefits Ìę

• Building skills
  • Work-integrated learning is believed to enhance learning outcomes. By applying theory and concepts students are learning about in classrooms, they can deepen their understanding and retain more information.
• Building connections
  • Work experience in a students’ desired field is an important step to developing a professional network. Often, students find post-graduation employment with the organization or company they worked with.
• Shaping career goals
  • A done on graduating post-secondary students across Ontario found that both college and university students found value in their WIL experience. The benefits identified included clarifying career interests and influencing their career goals.
• Developing personal maturity
  • The same study found that students identified personal growth as a benefit of their WIL experience. Additionally, exposure to a professional work environment increased their confidence when it came to their career prospects.
• Increasing earning potential
  • Employers consistently offer higher starting salaries to new graduates who have WIL experience on their resume.
• Nearly half of university students are already graduating with some form of WIL experience
  • You may be involved in a work-integrated learning experience already! Do you find it to be valuable experience?

The Challenges

• Financial barriers
  • Financial barriers are one of the biggest barriers to students participating in work-integrated learning experiences, as not all opportunities are paid. Often, this means that students who can engage in unpaid placements are privileged enough to have financial stability, something not all students have. Additionally, in some situations, a work-integrated experience could add to a students’ anticipated degree completion date.
• Extra demands on time
  • Student life is busy enough, and post-secondary students are often juggling part-time work with full-time classes to get by financially. The 2012 report found that nearly half of the students surveyed reported difficulty managing their work-integrated learning experience with the rest of their demands.
• International students and visas
  • International students have the added barrier of requiring a work visa in order to participate in paid placements. If they cannot get a work visa, their only option may be an unpaid placement, which, as noted before, can be a burden on a student who is already in a financially precarious situation.