This month, we hear from John Marris, Executive Director of the (TCRC). John brings a wealth of community research and teaching experience to the Centre, where he applies it to building relationships between the Peterborough community and Trent University faculty and students. John explores the ways the TCRC is helping to shape community engagement in Peterborough, and the challenges that the TCRC faces in ensuring community remains the heart of all the research projects brokered through the TCRC.

In your present role, what does being community-first mean to you?

It means that all of our projects start with a community partner initiating the project. Community-first means being responsive to the research needs of the community and keeping these needs as our focus. The primary assessment of the success of a project is ‘has it met the community’s needs?’ Therefore, we do not take on any research project that starts with academic intellectual curiosity. However, this is not always a perfect model. Sometimes our own staff, faculty or students have great ideas for project that would benefit the community and we’re not always responding to those ideas in the most open ways. Although our community-first model insures us against the problem that the academy knows what’s good for the community, there can be something limiting about a pure community-first model.

Is there any way the TCRC can help to change the way that academic institutions serve communities?

There is no formal structure for us to approach the message of “this is what we mean by community-first”. However, my ideal for Trent University would be, and I think this would apply elsewhere as well, that students who are coming into a research-based project have completed a short course in what community-based research is, the methods that might be involved and what it means to be sensitive to a community’s needs. Although in terms of student learning and student personal development, there is typically a very strong alignment between community interest and student interest. Often times, the student personal development and learning come from the delivery of something that’s genuinely useful to the community. I would also like to see faculty complete some kind of certification in community-engaged scholarship before they supervise students on projects.

How can you maintain communication channels when working on a project?

We set a very straightforward rule for students: “you will copy us on every email.” So that I’m hopefully aware when a community partner or faculty or somebody in the process is heading in a direction that might need some support. If I cannot in my head summarize where a project is at, then I send out an email. It’s not rocket science, its emails and meetings.

Collaboration is a constant at the Trent Community Research Centre! ŠElizabeth Thipphawong

What are the most exciting challenges that you are faced with in working with community and academic partners?

The exciting thing is the possibilities of the research question. When you have a community partner come to you with a research project and say “I really need to know this” and you see that there is a fascinating, exciting project for students that is very achievable—and you can think of great faculty who can take this on and be excited by it. That is the absolute joy of the work.

Students come to you and say “I just got a job because I put this on my resume,” or community groups come to you and say “we just got funding to buy a generator, so our turtles won’t die if the power goes out.” That’s when you know it’s worthwhile and a good number of our projects have those success stories.

Are there additional best practices you would like to mention?

Listening is obviously the key thing for good campus-community relations. There is something about learning to be present in a community situation and respecting the idea that a community or local organisation is a likely expert on their issues. I think that is vitally important.

A student explains her project at TCRC’s Community Engagement Forum, 2016. ŠPeterborough Examiner

Not everything can be solved with academic research. There’s lots of stuff that comes to us that just isn’t appropriate for the academy, because not everything can be solved in the academy. It is very easy to pick up an idea from the community and become excited about how it could work in the university, but are you really listening to what’s being asked? There are projects that people propose to us and I think “wow, that would be really exciting for students, but you know what it’s not going to get you to where you need to go” and we need to kind of walk away from the idea.

Making sure that you are supporting the students in doing the best work they possibly can rather than setting them a hurdle to jump over. Genuinely support students. Don’t play hardball with them in the way that academia has a tradition of doing. You know, saying “keep going until you’ve failed and I will tell you how you’ve failed.” That’s not going to help the community.

You have to in some sense be an activist in the community to do this work in order to know what the issues are. My colleagues and I all sit at various community tables. We get out into the community and are a part of what’s developing here in Peterborough.

Is there anything else that should be mentioned about the role of community engagement professionals and how they can be more community-first?

The university should put more money into this work. The university is an incredibly secure, empowered and strong body. So there is an obligation, from my perspective, that the university uses some of that resource, be it financial, be it time, for the benefit of the community. You know, Trent is the second largest employer in Peterborough I believe, and its salaries are off the scale compared to anyone in the non-profit sector. So it’s a case of that power being put to use for the community.

This month, we hear from Cathy Malcolm Edwards, a research facilitator at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University who focuses on social innovation. Having worked at ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ for more than 12 years, Cathy shares her insights on the importance of transparency, the imperative of student involvement, and how community engagement could be fostered across the university more broadly.

In your present role, what does being community-first mean to you?

The most important part is understanding the needs and wants of the community you are working with and creating processes and conversations that are empathy-based and aren’t based in assumptions but driven by the community voice. For me, that is what community-first is: ensuring that the voices that need to be heard are heard.

How do you balance the goals of the institution you are working for with the goals of any community partners you might have?

To begin with, I don’t think those two worlds are that far apart. It’s more about understanding constraints and managing expectations. I think the trouble comes in when we don’t understand the needs on either side. I spend a lot of time trying to translate those two worlds. I do think that a key part of the role is to do that translation but also try to build empathy. I try to make my answer, especially when working with community, not be ‘no’, but ‘let’s see what we can do’. Ask people, ‘what are the constraints?’ so I understand them better. Funding, for instance is a really big issue. I think it is really important to get money into the community, because whether or not we agree with it, money is power and you want that power base to shift to the community. But there are also constraints that the University has, because of where the funding is coming from. If we were more aware of these constraints, that would go a long way in building trust and managing the, what seem like, differences between the two groups.

How can you maintain communication through challenges as a research facilitator?

Some of the best practices, at least for me, have been around expectation management. I strongly encourage dialogue with partners to happen as early as possible. For instance, there is only a 20% likelihood that funding will actually happen. So it’s a lot to ask to invest that kind of energy and time intellectual capacity and resources for a 20% chance of funding. Having those dialogues up front and then building a plan for approaching it, understanding what people are capable of giving is key. When I first started, it was very much a transactional relationship. Now, the nature of research has changed entirely in the last decade. Part of that has to do with the government’s agenda around accountability. Organizations are getting involved a lot more, even so far as being co-designers and being engaged in research. Because they are being brought in at the very beginning there is a lot of expectation management that we need to put up front and that is key to communication.

The other part is to be transparent as you go through the different processes and limit the number of ‘one-off’ conversations and emails. The status of the project needs to be transparent. As soon as there is a question it starts to dilute the trust, so in a certain way it’s almost trying to be proactive in how you are approaching the overall management.

Do you ever work with community partners on more than one project in such a way that the relationship grows over time? How do those ongoing relationships differ?

People aren’t looking at things as a ‘one-and-done’ anymore because time is such a precious commodity that people want incremental value. They want to build capacity. They are so passionate and committed to the spaces you engage with them, whether around poverty reduction or youth homelessness or different causes, that I think in order to create lasting change you need to build on those relationships.

What about the students then? Is there any way that you in your role as research facilitator can encourage student engagement?

I love working with students. Experiential learning is critical in the province of Ontario. Soon every student will be required to participate in experiential learning in their post-secondary career. From a research perspective, we have normally been a little bit detached from the students, because when you are working on the funding side of things you often work with a professor, but are fully aware that for the most part anywhere from 60 – 80% of that funding will go to the students.

It is difficult for us to reach students directly. They are the hardest population to reach on campus. So I try to make use of existing mechanisms. There is an ad-hoc committee for community engaged pedagogy; I am able to reach out through the faculty that are part of that group. I’ve also done some work directly with professors to do more formal engagement in classrooms. I do some coaching and mentoring around social initiatives for social entrepreneurs, whether that’s social enterprises or advocacy movements. With the student experience office I’ve participated in the co-curricular record and opportunities to volunteer for students.

What actions can community-engaged professionals take to make sure they are community-first?

I think being community-first is essential if we want to continue this thought of being anchor institutions. That we as a university need to continue to find ways to live true to our mission and exemplify the “here for good” concept. So it starts to eliminate that “us and them” concept of the ivory tower. We are all citizens.

Are there additional best practices you would like to mention?

Members from ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´’s Student Success Centre share information about services.

I have a pipe dream. Organizationally, we could make a shift that would allow all professional staff to volunteer and be involved in community engagement for the university: allow them to engage in service or be engaged in pedagogy or activation projects or to have the opportunity to influence how they are providing service in their role. I think this would be a transformative experience for individuals. This may also help to eliminate some of the silos that exist on campus.

In terms of existing practice, I think I would encourage people to have conversations because community engagement happens across the university; it affects finance, the administration, faculty, students. If we had an entity that reached out horizontally, you could manage the competing priorities in a way that could benefit the whole. There are many programs on campus that are available but don’t have a community engagement office to make the connections between efforts. I think it would really take us to the next level. I think of it like a resource librarian: the librarian doesn’t need to have the answer, but the individual is an expert about accessing and managing information, knowing where to refer people to and connect with the faculty that are doing community engagement. Perhaps even doing knowledge synthesis of what all of the best practices are and acting as a resource tool for the community on campus and off.