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.”

In the Community Environmental Sustainability (CES) Ottawa Hub, we are about to share reflections on the day-to-day experience of community-campus engagement (CCE) in the upcoming release of the edited volume Seeking Equity and Inclusion in Canadian Municipalities, to be published by McGill-Queen’s University Press (pending peer review), and co-edited by Fran Klodawsky, Janet Siltanen and Caroline Andrew. The chapter that we have contributed to this volume, titled Supporting Local Civic Engagement through a “Community First” Approach to Foster Broader Social Inclusion in Development, examines the social sustainability efforts initiated by our community partner, Sustainable Living Ottawa East (SLOE), in response to a substantial new residential development that will soon be taking shape in their neighbourhood. Much of the chapter is devoted to a critical exploration of SLOE’s advocacy to the developer for a greater proportion of seniors and affordable housing to be included within this new development (including a related initiative, Innovative Housing for Older Adults in Old Ottawa East, which is geared towards also establishing a seniors’ cohousing community within this site).

The final section of the chapter contains a critical analysis of our own methods of engaging with our community partner. The writing process inspired us to consider challenges and opportunities associated with working with a group of residents that holds a certain degree of power within the community (as compared to a more vulnerable or marginalized population). We also considered issues of ethics, power relations and positionality associated with mobilizing knowledge related to the inner workings of the group. As part of this process, we invited a member of SLOE to review and respond to what we had written; her comments were then included within the final version of the chapter. Here are some brief excerpts from that exchange between our own reflections as CCE researchers and the community partner response:

CFICE reflection:

“[The experience of this engagement led us to] ask ourselves: What responsibilities do researchers have in exposing community partners to critical scholarship and academic insights? The truth is, it can be difficult to act as a critical friend, to challenge another’s process, even when the ultimate aim of the researcher is to further the social or environmental goals of the community partners. In these cases, what does it mean to put community first? What responsibilities do researchers have to propose academic knowledge and methods to help move the community partners’ objectives forward in a positive and meaningful way? We were not always able to initiate such fierce conversations, partly due to time and funding constraints, but also because we were concerned that it may not be our place to do so.”

Community Response:

“Interesting and good food for thought. I frankly never thought about our relationship in these terms, but would have been (and would be) more than open to some stirring of the pot – e.g., via a presentation to the group on some more critical/challenging viewpoints. Maybe we should have explicitly established this as an element of the working relationship right from the outset? … I do appreciate that … [the RA] played an important role in keeping a focus on affordability and has also gently re-inserted other goals and principles (including environmental sustainability itself) along the way when they risked getting lost in the shuffle.”

CFICE reflection:

“[The approach we adopt] offers opportunities for the researcher to expose citizen groups to scholarly concepts (and their accompanying disciplinary jargon) related to diversity and inclusion, as well as responses to/engagement with neoliberal modes of governance. However, we must also remain attentive to the impact(s) of our discourse… How might a slippage between the particular vocabularies employed in [academic and non-academic worlds] influence power relationships between community partners and research assistants? Differing languages (such as those of policymaking and academia) may, consciously or unconsciously, intimidate or preclude understanding. They could also create boundaries around groups or ways of knowing to the exclusion of others. How might these manifest within these relationships – in both directions (i.e. working with the powerful)?”

Community Response:

“Also very good questions and perspectives. There is no doubt we would have had a hard time accommodating highly academic discourse and ideas in the midst of the very concerted practical efforts that needed to be made, on a volunteer basis, to advance our cause. That said, as noted above, a more explicit agreement to accommodate some of this kind of discourse as we went along might have made for some interesting additional explorations.”

Nestled between Main Street, the Rideau River and St. Paul’s University, is 26 acres formerly known as . This space, currently owned by , an Ottawa real-estate developer, is what the (IHOA) group hopes will one day be the site of a proposed cohousing community for older adults.

To help the IHOA influence how the Oblates land, now known as , is developed, Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) has partnered with (SLOE), a citizen group that advocates for sustainable development in Old Ottawa East. By assembling research on site-specific sustainable methods of development, SLOE and CFICE are helping the IHOA build their case for a sustainable cohousing community that can then be presented to The Regional Group for consideration.

“The goals of this project are to bring together a community of older adults, within a housing community of 40 units to go in Greystone Village, where residents have a say over the aging process and how they live. It is being planned as a community where people can take care of each other as they age. There are also plans to accommodate some affordable housing for older adults with lower incomes,” says Magda Goemans, a research assistant for CFICE’s Community Environmental Sustainability hub.

With support from CFICE, SLOE and the IHOA, along with a coalition of groups including and , have worked towards these goals to influence a visionary redevelopment of Greystone Village. As part of her work with CFICE, Goemans supports the research and coordination needs of SLOE and the IHOA. Recently, Goemans helped the IHOA organize a finance and ownership workshop to discuss affordability options for the proposed cohousing community.

“The affordability component is really important to us,” said Rebecca Aird of IHOA. “The concept of affordability will help us think through how redevelopment could be approached.”

The City of Ottawa has a target of 25 per cent affordability for all new developments. The City of Ottawa deems housing as affordable when people at the 30 per cent and below income level are spending only 30 per cent of their income on housing.

“If we can meet that target, that would be amazing,” said Aird with regard to Greystone Village.

City of Ottawa support for the IHOA’s proposal would mean the possibility of opening the cohousing community up to the City’s waiting list for affordable subsidized housing. In Ottawa, this list includes more than 2,000 seniors. The concern among some workshop attendees was that, if they offered housing opportunities to persons on the City of Ottawa’s social housing list, some living in the IHOA housing community might not share the same community-engagement values. However, others at the workshop fully supported the idea.

The project is in the midst of discussing options and many important decisions will not be made until later on in the process. Still, Aird is very optimistic about the progress these groups have made and their enthusiasm for the project.

“I’m totally confident with the skills in this room that this is a group that can do it. By doing it, we’ll also create hope and possibility for people doing similar things,” she said.

• ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ faculty
• City of Ottawa and National Capital Commission (NCC) members, and
• professional consultants.

Sustainable development options ranged from public transit, shoreline protection, water management to pathway and trail design and district energy. View the following by Michael Liat (CES) and videos for more.

Ottawa Centre Eco District Videos
ĐÓ°ÉÔ­´´ University students in the Multimedia and Design program created videos for to introduce the Ottawa Centre EcoDistrict initiative, as well as highlighting green buildings and green roofs in the EcoDistrict.
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Sustainable Living Ottawa East Videos
Explore the potential development of the Oblate Lands in Old Ottawa East.
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Explore the potential of District Energy Systems for the Oblate lands in Old Ottawa East