This report summarizes the experience, models and tools, results, challenges, lessons and prospects of the University of Winnipeg Community Renewal Corporation (UWCRC). Established by the University of Winnipeg’s Board of Regents in 2005 as a special-purpose entity to implement the University’s growth and sustainability plan, UWCRC is a separately incorporated non-profit, charitable corporation with its own Board of Directors (eight members from the University of Winnipeg (UW) and eight from the broader community) and staff.

Commissioned jointly by the McConnell Foundation and UWCRC, and authored by Edward Jackson, the report has been cited in popular and professional articles on municipal , community-university and social . To download the Summary Report, click here. To access the Full Report, click here.

is one of Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement’s (CFICE) community partners in the Community Environmental Sustainability Hub.

A map of Old Ottawa East.

Since 2007, SLOE has been working to make a difference in the community of Old Ottawa East. A network of like-minded people living in the area, some with career experience in environmental sustainability, dedicate their time and efforts towards planning, developing, networking and fundraising for projects that support greater community sustainability in the area.

Rebecca Aird, founding chair of SLOE, says SLOE was created to solve a need in the community.

“Sustainability obviously needs to be addressed at all levels – from the personal through to the global,” Aird says.

“SLOE really was a response by a number of individuals who came together and just really wanted to see that action at the local level.”

Aird says she joined SLOE because of positive impact people could have on the community.

“I’ve never gotten so deeply involved in very local stuff before SLOE but it’s like many things – you begin to lift the lid on what’s going on in a certain community, or in a certain sector, and you just discover all sorts of wonderful people doing wonderful things.”

SLOE focuses on four main themes: food, energy, transportation, and green spaces and ecology. Aird also stresses the importance of open communication between the organization and the community members, and considers it the catchall element.

Currently, SLOE is working on a number of projects within the community, including restoring and ecologically enhancing the shoreline in Old Ottawa East, and ensuring a sustainable and green development of the Oblate Lands by Greystone Village.

Aird says the community of Old Ottawa East was pleased by the work SLOE did to ensure the developers build with sustainability in mind, which CFICE helped produce.

“We got a lot of support around the work we did with CFICE and ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University to engage the regional group on Greystone and make sure the regional group really knew that we were serious about trying to make a difference in their development,” she says.

“I think the community felt proud about that.”

In the past, SLOE initiated a farmers market pilot program that grew to be so successful, it returned the next year. In addition, SLOE started a community and children’s garden, and created more civic spaces within the community.

A group gathers for the season opening of Old Ottawa East’s Main Farmers Market in May 2014. ©SLOE

“There’s more places where people actually come together and interact with each other. That’s been one of the main social achievements of SLOE, I think, and all of the other projects really brought the community together; people actually come out,” Aird says.

In all of the projects, Aird says, research played an important role in moving forward.

“You need research to be able to make the right choices about where to focus your energy, how to go about projects, engage and convince others, and to really establish yourself as a credible player and a credible force,” she says.

SLOE’s contributions to Old Ottawa East have made it a more sustainable community by adding to the quality of life in the neighbourhood.

“Even that in itself, to some extent, is an environmentally sustainable thing because the happier people are locally and the more they stick around locally, the less they’ll travel in their cars and the more they will feel themselves like contributing to their own community,” Aird says.

“It’s a virtuous circle and has had a broader impact for sure. A lot of other people in other communities have looked at what’s happened and worked on similar things or at least just been inspired by what’s possible.”

The Community Environmental Sustainability (CES) hub at Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) works towards facilitating community-campus partnerships to increase environmental sustainability. The CES hub functions at the local level in three key communities across Ontario: Ottawa, Peterborough and Haliburton.

Brianna Salmon, newly appointed executive director at GreenUP, helps facilitate those partnerships to increase environmental sustainability in Peterborough, Ont.

Previously GreenUP’s manager of the transportation department, Brianna says she was drawn to GreenUP because of its commitment to environmental sustainability.

“The work that GreenUP and organizations like GreenUP do is really vital, both in terms of direct program implementation and partner facilitation, but also being an advocacy voice for progressive policies and plans within all levels of government,” she says.

That’s what drew her to this kind of work and she says it’s been hugely humbling.

“I was interested in finding an organization where I could engage in really grounded, vocal work and I think that’s been something’s that’s felt very meaningful to me.”

CFICE and GreenUP partner with Trent Community Research Centre and Trent University to facilitate community-campus partnerships, allowing students and academics the opportunity to partner with the community and work together towards environmental sustainability.

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

“As an organization, we welcome hundreds of students to projects but it can often be challenging for us as an organization to manage. We have limited capacity and a lot of our programs and staff are grant funded so they have specific restrictions and things they should be focusing on,” she says. “We recognize it’s very valuable but often facilitating student research isn’t one of those things.”

Brianna says she was drawn to the CFICE project to help facilitate those partnership opportunities.

“I was really interested in looking at how we can support the capacity of community partners, like us, in actually engaging in student research.”

Brianna says GreenUP’s partnership with CFICE has been very meaningful.

“CFICE has meant to me and my organization the opportunity to engage really deliberately and in a way that is more transparent with our academic partners to make sure that our partnerships are as sustainable and impactful as possible,” she says.

But measuring that impact can sometimes be hard due to lack of funding for evaluation.

“Doing a robust evaluation program is something you don’t often get funded for in the non-profit sector and it can be a bit of a gap from my perspective,” she says.

“Often what tends to happen is that we move from project to project really not being able to do much meaningful evaluation.”

Without evaluation, Brianna says, it’s hard to understand what the long-term impact is of GreenUP’s community interventions.

“That was one of the reasons we were really interested in engaging in the CFICE project – to really try and increase our capacity to reflect critically on the kinds of activities that we undertake. Also making sure that we are being able to address some of the environmental challenges that GreenUP seeks to program around in a way that’s really strategic and thoughtful,” she says.

The partnerships are important to get everyone working towards the common goal of environmental sustainability.

“Making sure that the health of our environment remains a priority is everybody’s responsibility,” Brianna says.

“Our livelihoods and human health are contingent upon it.”