Peter AndrƩe, Principal Investigator of CFICE

Dr. Peter AndrĆ©eā€™s contribution to CFICE has been immense from day one. He was involved, along with Geri Briggs, Ted Jackson andĢżothers, with planning and designing the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project. He began his journey with CFICE as an academic co-lead of the . In 2015, Peter then became CFICEā€™s Principal Senior Investigator.

To Peter AndrĆ©e, CFICE is a sincere team effort to figure out how to do community-campus partnerships in for civil society organizations. CFICE is led by a large number of people and thatā€™s what makes it rich, unique and valuable.

Community-campus partnerships are so important to Peter because he believes universities have such a big impact on our communities and generally respond to societal needs. However, he thinks universities can do better and have a bigger impact in our communities.

Peter Andree talks CFICE at the CACSL Conference 2016.

It isnā€™t always easy to do community campus partnerships. Peter recalls the late Cathleen Kneen and how she said community-campus engagement is like dancing because it takes time, thereā€™s a lot of toe stepping until you learn the dance. According to Peter, our current education model does not emphasize collaboration and he believes that collaborative skills end up being cultivated after going out, working and learning from the community.

ā€œIf we could get more work being actively done with community organizations and local governments on issues that really matter, we could have more of an impact and universities and colleges would also be fulfilling their mandates.ā€

Peterā€™s interest in community-campus engagement comes from his passion for meaningful collaboration and working with stakeholders to find the best answers on our issues. Efficiency is also important to Peter because he believes that we could use a lot of our resources better to have an impact.

Katherine Topolnski and Peter Andree pose for a selfie with Mayor Nenshi at the CACSL 2016 Conference.

After four years of working with CFICE so far, Peter is very excited to share and learn from the results of our year four evaluation.

To people wanting to become more engaged in their community, Peter says: ā€œGo out and start listening to what the community needs and get involved.ā€

Volunteer Canada recognizes Liz Weaver for her contributions to volunteerism in Canada at the Healthy, Resilient Communities Conference May 2014.

Campus community research partnerships are exciting and challenging, says Liz Weaver, Vice-President of . For the last three years, Liz also co-led the poverty reduction hub of Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement, or .

Under her co-leadership, the hub researched big issues in poverty, including living wage, the stigma of poverty and access to post-secondary education. Now, Liz is leaving CFICE to take on a new role at Tamarak, directing its .

All at CFICE would like to thank Liz for her wonderful work with the poverty hub, and congratulate her on her new position.

ā€œI particularly appreciated the way Liz promoted CFICE, her generosity sharing her knowledge, and her commitment to improving the infrastructure for community campus partners to progress together towards a more just and equitable society,ā€Ģżsays Geri Briggs, co-manager of CFICE and director of the .

ā€œLiz really understood the pressures and goals of campuses, while being deeply rooted in the community. That meant she was able to effectively translate the needs of campuses to community groups and facilitate strong relationships,ā€ says Karen Schwartz, Associate Dean of Research & Graduate Affairs, Faculty of Public Affairs, ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ University. ā€œLiz is a great problem solver ā€“ sheā€™s very clear-thinking and gets to the root of an issue right away,ā€ adds Schwartz.

Liz Weaver shared her parting insights on working in campus community partnerships:

• ā€œA lot of this work is based on fragile relationships, because people come and go,ā€ Liz explains. ā€œYou have to dive deeper than just one-to-one connections and create resilient relationships that span broader communities.ā€

• Academics and students tend to work on an eight-month calendar, which presents challenges for community organizations that work year-round, she says. ā€œThereā€™s also more bureaucracy within large institutions like universities, so we have to figure out how to navigate the system,ā€ she adds.

• More than anything, itā€™s challenging for stakeholders to carve out the time for campus-community partnerships. ā€œEverybody does this off the side of their desks, and despite best intentions, these partnerships often compete with all of our other priorities,ā€ says Liz.

• Itā€™s also critical to realize that campus and community have different goals, says Liz. Campus partners emphasize teaching, learning and discussion, while community partners focus on engagement and policy change. Ģżā€œThey arenā€™t necessarily competing; they can be complementary agendas,ā€ says Liz. ā€œBut they are different agendas, and itā€™s vital to recognize those differences and find the mutuality of purpose.ā€

• Moving forward, Liz sees a trend in community work, with more activity at the cross-community level, as opposed to individual program and services. Ģżā€œIn many communities, we reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. So, Tamarack is trying to figure out strategies for the co-generation of knowledge for social change,ā€ she says. Liz believes campus-community partnerships are an intriguing opportunity to research the systematic issues in poverty and key identify barriers.

What big questions! Still, these are the questions I have been sitting with over the last few days at the Community-Campus Partnerships for Health conference in Chicago.

I have heard stories about the power of academic researchers ā€“ those who hold the purse strings of research projects that are intended to be ā€œcommunity-basedā€. Iā€™ve seen academics cry as they speak of their inability to get their institutions and funders to get resources to community participants. Iā€™ve heard about the informal navigation of power relations to ā€˜get things doneā€™ by ā€˜bending the rulesā€™. Iā€™ve heard about the precarious position of student research assistants in projects. Iā€™ve heard it ā€˜all dependsā€™, that different forms of agency matters, that language matters, and that context matters. Ģż

These observations led me to want to break open the dichotomy of campus/community and really unpack the different types of agents involve in this work, the forms of power each has access to, as well as their vulnerabilities in these relationships. Iā€™d like to see a table that includes public health institutions as well as networks of grassroots activists, students, professors, university research officers, and institutional funders and more. What forms of power does each of these actors encounter and/or mobilize in their day to day practices? ĢżGeri started such a tableā€¦ maybe we can keep developing it collectively?

In the CFICE story-telling session and workshop on Thursday, we were given a lot of great ideas from participants at CCPH about how power ā€˜worksā€™ in CCE, whether or not power-sharing needs to be explicitly addressed in this work, and some of the strategies that folks use to address questions of power in order to be fair to one another as well as effective. ĢżOn the functioning of power, I found participants grounded in different theoretical approaches. For some power is ā€˜heldā€™ by specific actors, for others it is ā€˜web-likeā€™ and relational. Others envision power through metaphors like a merry-go-round. Power can mean churning around in circles without any sense of who is doing the spinning or why.

In the midst of all of this talk of power, we heard lots about how people work within power-relations to get the job done as best they can. These strategies included the informal ones, such as the centrality of relationship building and then working through the back channels of universities and other institutions to make CCE happen well. We also heard about formal mechanisms for ensuring power is shared, like partnership agreements, contracts with RAs, data-sharing agreements and the establishment of partnership principles. What a lot of great ideas to collect and examine for lessonsĢż

These discussions led me to wonder about the strengths, and the limitations, of the various models that I see at work in CFICE. ĢżAgain, another table comes to mind. I see so many forms of community-campus engagement, with different constellations of actors and roles. How capable are these various models at implementing the insights weā€™re learning about how to share power responsibly (both formally and informally)? Are some better, or at least more transferable, than others? What are the limitations of our models? Ģż(And what new models can such an examination get us to?)

Among the models I see at work in CFICE, we have a Violence Against Women hub that actively tries to keep its community partners out of the messiness of an academic research project with lots of institutional burdens. I understand why they do this, but does it mean that some important decisions donā€™t include the perspectives of key voices? I donā€™t know, but it may be worth further discussion by those most affected. Then we have the ā€˜brokerageā€™ models, which are varied in CFICE. The TCCBE has a particular way of working that sees their organization very much ā€˜betweenā€™ community and university. Connie Nelson and her team at the Food Security Research Network in Thunder Bay see themselves as working ā€˜in communityā€™, bringing particular resources and capacities (e.g. mobilizing courses and students), but defining directions alongside others with a shared vision of the future. Then there is Katherine Piggott at Region of Waterloo Public HealthĢż who plays a facilitator role setting up internships and student placements. Her work is different structurally from the TCCBE and FSRN, but there are lots of similarities too. All work among other actors as ā€˜gate-keepersā€™ maybe, but are also ā€˜bridge-buildersā€™ and ā€˜convenersā€™ (Katherineā€™s preferred word) of the work. Finally, we have various people who do the bridge-building work on their own, off the sides of their desks. Trish and I at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ both do this in different ways.

The questions I set out at the top are really too big. There are various ways of thinking about power, different constellations of actors involved, and many ways of undertaking the work of CCE. Still, I feel like there is a question in all of this that we can tackle together as a way of starting the cross-hub analysis. Such work will allow us to see if we even have the vocabulary to talk with each other, and whether weā€™re gathering the data needed to make comparisons among models. It would build the space for dialogue so that we can learn from one anotherā€™s experiences and figure out what weā€™re getting from such a huge project that can ā€˜contributeā€™ to the bigger debate about whether and how CCE can do its part for progressive social change.

How can we hone our questions about power in CCE so that we have something we can really chew on together?

Reflections on power I community campus engagement ā€“ penned on May 3, 2014 by Peter AndrĆ©e, co-lead of the Community Food Security hub

Ģż

Please see the following for more information.

Featuring 20 case studies from more than a dozen countries around the world, in both the Global North and Global South, the book is the product of a SSHRC project jointly carried out by Victoria, ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ and UQAM universities.

School of Public Policy and Administration graduates Evren Tok and Letlotlo Gariba are co-authors with Professor Jackson in a chapter on institutional structures to support effective research partnerships.

Published by Manchester University Press, the collection is part of the publisherā€™s series on Universities and Lifelong Learning.ĢżTheĢżĢżprovides more information.

Edward Jackson, Principal Investigator for CFICE presented “: How Community Campus Partnerships Can Help Renew Local Economies” to the Annual U-Links Celebration of Research Fleming College, Haliburton