This book includes chapters from each of the hub’s partners, and outlines the different models of engagement used by each partnership to complete work towards reducing poverty in their respective communities.

To view and/or download a PDF copy of the book, click on the image below. Happy reading!

In this webinar, our presenters gave an overview of some diverse approachesĀ to capturing and communicating impact within academic institutions and with their community partners. The webinar touched on:

• What community impact looks like in specific campus-community projects and why measuring it matters to the Government of Ontario;
• How post-secondary institutions can and define and measure community impact in a way that resonates with the needs of local community priorities and encompasses the global reach of the university or college; and
• Some of the promising ā€˜community-firstā€™ practices related to institutionalizing and sustaining impactful CCE.

Video Link

If you missed out on the day-of presentation, not to worry. Weā€™ve made it accessible below.

Resources

The following items were shared by the presenters:

Community Impacts: Metrics and methods from the perspectives of: i) Ontario Higher Education Policy and ii) the Community development sector — Slide deck by Dr. Isabelle Kim

Higher Education, Impact, and the United Nations SDG’s — Slide deck by Dr. Crystal Tremblay

What are some promising community-first practices related to institutionalizing and sustaining impactful CCE? — Slide deck by Magda Goemans

• at University of Victoria, developed by Crystal Tremblay.
• on measuring community engaged scholarship
• Recognizing Excellence in Community Engaged Scholarship (PDF)
• Campus Engage’s “” report.
• Embedding an Ethic of Community Engagement in PSIsĀ – Literature Review of Engagement Measurement Tools

As well, one attendee asked the following question, which could not be addressed during the webinar:Ā My experience with CCE impact (bigger picture) is that we need co-governance between community and higher ed partner and govt., funding inside and out and a legal structure(e.g. non-profit) to sustain the effort beyond the dependency on HE admin leaders- comments?

Dr. Isabelle Kim provided the following written response: I 100% agree that co-governance is key. U of T instated a CCP Advisory Council composed of staff, students, faculty and community partners. While this is not a ā€˜governing bodyā€™ as the CCP is not a non-profit organization and the council is not a board of directors, the CCP most definitely takes into consideration the advice of its council members in all aspects of our planning and programming and this council plays a key role in the future developments of the CCPā€™s work.

Presenters

Crystal Tremblay is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography and Special Advisor on Community Engaged Scholarship at the University of Victoria. She is a social geographer and community-based scholar activist with over a decade of international experience doing research on topics related to resource governance and livelihood enhancement. She specializes in using participatory video and arts-based methods for community engagement, capacity building and program evaluation working across sectors with higher education institutions, government, and civil society organizations. She is passionate about cultivating new spaces for creative citizen engagement and the co-creation of knowledge leading to environmental and social equity. Crystal has done extensive research and projects on CCE funding, impact and policy in Canada and is eager to support building a long-term movement and infrastructure for lasting change, which benefits communities and incentivizes academia. For more information, please visit her website: .

Magda Goemans is a PhD candidate in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, and a research assistant with the CFICE Evaluation and Analysis Working Group. A current focus of her CFICE efforts includes research on best practices for institutionalizing impactful CCE. Magdaā€™s doctoral work involves a critical analysis of household perspectives of climate change risk and adaptation action in Halifax and Ottawa.Ā Her research interests relate to climate change adaptation, disaster mitigation and citizen engagements with urban ecologies in Canadian cities.

Isabelle Kim,Ā Ph.D, has twenty years of experience working in community-based health, education and research, public engagement and international development in Canada and abroad. She has worked on a wide range of different community development projects, including medical and nursing education; community arts youth projects; mental health and HIV/AIDS education; womenā€™s health and girlsā€™ education in Afghanistan, food security in Pakistan; national advocacy and public education campaigns on climate change, and other global social justice issues. In August 2017, she was appointed Director of the University of Torontoā€™s Centre for Community Partnerships (CCP). She also teaches graduate courses in educational research methods and cooperative learning at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education. Isabelleā€™s involvement with CFICE began in Fall 2017, when she joined the working group on community impacts. In Spring 2018 she chaired a regional roundtable on community-campus engagement, co-hosted by the CCP and CFICE, which brought together over 50 staff and faculty from colleges and universities in Ontario, as well as community partners, and higher education policy perspectives. Her current research is exploring the different ways in which community impacts are conceptualized and measured by academic, community development and policy sectors, and the implications for sustaining reciprocal community-university partnerships.

Moderator: David Peacock, Ph.D,Ā is the Executive Director of Community Service-Learning in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Alberta, Canada. His research encompasses global service-learning, student equity policy and practices in higher education, curriculum theory, community-university engagement and ā€˜first generationā€™ university studentsā€™ participation in experiential learning programming. David is active in developing Canadian networks for community-engaged learning and research.

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 RAā€™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.

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

So, Magda, letā€™s start with you. Iā€™m hoping you can tell me a bit about your roles with the CFICE project.

Magda: So Iā€™ve been an RA with CFICE for about 5 years now, and Iā€™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, Iā€™ve been working as an RA with the evaluation and analysis working group. Through that, weā€™ve had a really good opportunity to look at what weā€™ve learned from the first phase of CFICE and Iā€™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, Iā€™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 weā€™re looking at aligning the different institutions such as funders, non-government organizations, and academic institutions.

Chelsea: Moving on to the topic of funding, Iā€™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 Iā€™ve learned a lot about funding, just from my own personal experience and through some of the work that weā€™ve been doing in terms of the analysis of our learnings from the first phase of CFICE. One of the big things Iā€™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, Iā€™ve been able to understand that from that perspective. Iā€™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. Weā€™ve seen that time and time again. Whereas in the opposite situation, where there are barriers to funding, administrative hurdles, if thereā€™s just this huge time lag in terms of getting funding, that tends toā€¦give the appearance of devaluing community research, which is of course the last thing institutions would want to do.

From my own perspective, Iā€™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 itā€™s there for several years, has added such stability to my day-to-day work as a student, and as students weā€™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 Iā€™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, ā€˜Iā€™m being paid for all the time Iā€™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.ā€™ So thatā€™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 wouldnā€™t have been able to fund themselves or wouldnā€™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 itā€™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, thatā€™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 didnā€™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 weā€™ve kind of touched on this a little bit, but Iā€™m wondering, from the student perspective, what does CCE funding more broadly mean to you? Whatā€™s itā€™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. Iā€™ve literally gone beyond the office, beyond the classroom, and I believe Iā€™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. Iā€™ve been able to maintain a momentum in my connections with people and a momentum on the projects Iā€™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 wouldnā€™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 whoā€™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 Iā€™m glad it came with funding.

Chelsea: Thatā€™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. Weā€™ll be hearing from Genevieve Harrison, the administrative guru with the CFICE project right here at ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““.

Talk to you then!

Magda GoemansĀ Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā Ā  Michael Lait

The Community Environmental Sustainability (CES) Hub of the CFICE project aims to promote local actions that reduce carbon and ecological footprints, mitigate climate change, and lead to greater community resilience. For CES Academic Co-lead, Patricia Ballamingie, several skilled research assistants have helped her engage with community and not-for-profit groups on their sustainability projects and initiatives. ā€œI help to connect the talents and expertise of my graduate students to groups within civil society seeking to advance sustainable community development,ā€ says Ballamingie. What any given research assistant actually does is quite varied, and Magda Goemans and Michael Lait are two CES Hub research assistants that illustrate this point well. Both Magda and Michael have been involved in organizing projects related to environmental sustainability, but in different capacities.

Magda recently assisted a local neighbourhood organization, Sustainable Living Ottawa East (SLOE), in the planning and facilitation of its Deep Green Experts Forum. This event brought a wide variety of experts together to discuss opportunities and challenges associated with developing a prime area of urban greenspace in Old Ottawa East. SLOE is attempting to persuade developers to adopt more sustainable options for the site, including alternatives such as shoreline restoration, local connectivity, renewable energy, and affordable and seniors housing.

For Magda, organizing the forum has been a very intense but fulfilling experience. ā€œI realized, when telling people about what Iā€™ve been doing to prepare for the forum, how proud I am to be a part of this effort,ā€ Magda says. ā€œA great deal of energy has gone into making this event happen, but I think it can provide real inspiration to other neighbourhoods that are facing similar development issues.ā€ Magda hopes to continue working with SLOE members into the summer months and beyond, as this RA work complements nicely with her doctoral research on community sustainability within ŠÓ°ÉŌ­““ā€™s Department of Geography and Environmental Studies (Magdaā€™s research focuses more specifically on sustainability as it relates to climate change adaptation). As she explains: ā€œIā€™ve worked with great community-based efforts as part of my professional background before returning to school, but in this case itā€™s been a particular thrill for me to observe the work of such a motivated and effective group.ā€

Michaelā€™s role in the CES Hub is twofold. First, he is helping in the organization of the Ottawa Eco-Talent Network (OETN). The OETN is a start-up volunteer organization that provides pro-bono research and consulting services to community and not-for-profit groups on their sustainability projects and issues. Working as a CFICE RA for the OETN, Michael was mentored by an OETN advisor, Norman Moyer, a past Government of Canada Assistant Deputy Minister. Norman guided Michael through the preparation and delivery of the OETNā€™s business case, which was recently adopted by the OETN steering committee. ā€œI didnā€™t go into sociology ever thinking I would produce a business case, but working with Norman has easily been one of the best experiences of my PhD so farā€, Michael says. In the development of the business case, Norman and Michael facilitated a focus group with the client, the OETN steering committee, from which the organizationā€™s goal, strategies, and plans were derived. Afterwards, Michael produced a report summarizing key themes and issues remaining in the OETNā€™s development. ā€œThe brainstorming sessionā€”held at Normanā€™s suggestionā€”was of immense benefit to the groupā€™s formation and maturation: not only did it tease out subtle differences of opinion, but also showed the issues where consensus had been reached,ā€ Michael added.

The second role Michael occupies in the CES Hub is that of a Knowledge Mobilization consultant, where he will profile community events, campus initiatives, and local issues on the CFICE KM blog. ā€œI think that my doctoral research and work as a CFICE RA are actually linked through knowledge mobilization.ā€ Michaelā€™s research charts the formation of a conservation group, which contested the federal governmentā€™s planning and development of Gatineau Park in the late 60s. ā€œI wonder if the Occupy Gatineau Park movement would have had more success if the earlier struggles of conservationists against the highway development were better known.ā€ Michael went on to explain that, before road construction was underway in the mid-70s, conservationists had tried to convince the National Capital Commission of an alternate route, presenting the federal agency with a realignment plan prepared by a road engineer. ā€œScientific evidence and expert opinion often donā€™t influence official plans and policies, and Iā€™d like my research to help identify political and institutional blockages to knowledge mobilization, and seek out ways of overcoming them,ā€ Michael said.