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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Abstract

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

Map of Peterborough’s Stewart Street Neighbourhood ©ANC Peterborough

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

ANC project participants hard at work.
©Elizabeth Thipphawong

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

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.”