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.”

Boundary spanners are integral to the success of community-campus engagement (CCE). At CFICE (Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement), we are lucky to have several boundary spanners on our team. We see boundary spanners as people with the ability to bring together academics, community members, and organizations to work towards a common goal. Not to be confused with a broker, a boundary spanner is heavily invested in both sides of the collaboration and is often directly involved in the project as opposed to acting as an intermediary.

In order to understand more about boundary spanning, I interviewed , associate professor in the Department of Geography & Environmental Management at the University of Waterloo, and a member of CFICE’s Community Food Security Hub. Dr. Scott is a boundary spanner, which can be seen from the many roles she’s taken throughout her career. Her work focuses on international and rural development issues including: land access, ecological farming and rural livelihoods, social justice, and equality. She’s also the past president of the Canadian Association for Food Studies (CAFS), which brings together academics as well as professionals from government and community organizations.

Dr. Scott became convinced of the value of an integrated food system approach, which she later linked to CCE and boundary-spanning, while at the inaugural Food Secure Canada assembly held in Waterloo in 2005. She later became involved with the Waterloo Region Food System Roundtable, a networking and policy-making group working on building a strong voice for a healthy food system in the Waterloo region. Dr. Scott draws on her experience and involvement with the Roundtable, of which she was co-chair from 2007-2011, as an example of her work as a boundary spanner. It’s important to Dr. Scott because of its interdisciplinary and cross-cutting nature. Through her work with the Roundtable, Dr. Scott has been able to collaborate with community and government partners (such as Waterloo Region Public Health) to identify research issues of interest to these food system stakeholders. Dr. Scott says, “I also reached out to Food Secure Canada for their input on relevant research needs as well. As a result, some groups researched issues of food security in Canada’s north, and challenges facing new farmers, which are two of Food Secure Canada’s priority areas.”

In addition to diversifying Dr. Scott’s research and knowledge, her involvement with the Roundtable provides opportunities for students in her 4^th year food systems and sustainability course to work on research issues identified by community groups and Roundtable members. According to Dr. Scott, working collaboratively with community groups is particularly beneficial for students. Through her CFICE work, Dr. Scott has seen first-hand how partnerships between students and community organizations teach students about the challenges that community groups face, and how to utilize campus resources, particularly the time and energy of students and faculty, to help tackle these challenges. By going out into the community, students are exposed to different forms of community knowledge, providing them with an alternate perspective from what they usually learn in class. By gaining an understanding of the community perspective, students can apply this new knowledge in class to critically think about the issues facing these organizations. The students then prepared meaningful research reports that were later posted on the Roundtable’s to be publicly accessed. Some have even been cited in by Waterloo Region Public Health.

In CCE, in general, the community partner benefits by having students assist with addressing the needs of the organization. Community-campus partnerships also provide the community organization with an opportunity to expand their network to include a student audience. Students often encourage each other to volunteer and get involved with organizations with which they’ve had a good experience.

In Dr. Scott’s experience as a boundary spanner, she says that the most important requirements for successful community-campus partnerships are trust, and personal connections. Boundary spanners should work towards building trust between both parties. “Personal interest in the collaboration and commitment go a long way as well,” says Dr. Scott. Taking the time to get to know the people involved rather than working on the project itself straight away may not seem so productive, but Dr. Scott says that in the long run this personal relationship enhances the collaboration, ultimately leading to partnerships that last longer and produce more results.

To young people looking to get involved in CCE, Dr. Scott says, “Have an open mind, find out who the movers and shakers are in the community, and connect with them.” Dr. Scott also advises young people and students to get involved, regardless of their experience-level.

The report can be accessed .

Congratulations to Patricia Ballamingie, Co-lead of the CES Hub with Todd Barr of the Trent Centre for Community Based Education, receivined , which will assist her in moving forward the work of the current and future community environmental sustainability projects.

Current projects include Regional Approaches to Environmental and Social Innovation, Community University Partnerships in Strategic Planning, and Potential for ”Deep Green” Development of the Oblate Lands in Old Ottawa East.

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