This article was first posted by Aimee Coueslan on and is being shared with her permission on the CFICE website.

In their core strategic planning, universities across Canada are now identifying community engagement as a core function of research, teaching, and learning. Universities are also recognizing the power of engagement to enhance learning and research. In terms of learning, community engagement can provide students with a new sense of purpose for their education, as well as a sense of belonging that can transform young lives and support student mental health. Community engagement also allows different types of learners to thrive, while enhancing competencies and confidence. In the case of community-engaged research, benefits include increased research impact, greater opportunities to translate findings into practice, expanded funding opportunities, and increased capacity of both researchers and community groups. Community-engaged research provides an opportunity to positively effect change in one’s own community through the development of research questions that are responsive to community needs.

Community-First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE), a seven-year SSHRC-funded action research project based at �Ӱ�ԭ�� University, has officially launched a national network and community of practice called��Community-Campus Engage Canada (CCEC). To celebrate the launch on June 20, 2018, CFICE convened a��panel��to discuss how to provide long-term support to the community-campus engagement (CCE) movement and ensure that it maximizes value for all partners. The discussion began with the perspective that community-campus engagement must be community-driven; it must put the priorities of the community first and allow the community to decide how it wants to contribute and how it would like to benefit. The panelists addressed what being community-driven means in practice, and their answer had four parts: establishing participatory, horizontal relationships; developing a shared vision; addressing issues of equity and inclusivity; and the democratic communication of research findings.

Relationships

Catherine Graham of the��prioritized the establishment of relationships as a necessary first step. Researchers need to communicate directly with community members, approaching them with the perspective of “What can I do for you?” There are four interrelated concepts integral to the establishment of these relationships: shared power, cultural safety, knowledge democracy, and long-term reciprocity.

1.��Sharing Power: At its heart, sharing power means humbling oneself and allowing the community to be the teacher and the academic to be the student. The researcher must know when to step back and follow the community’s lead. Power is not necessarily shared 50/50.

2.��Cultural Safety: involves creating a safe respectful welcoming environment with no denial of who people are and what they need. In this environment, people are supported to draw strengths from their identity, culture, and community. Creating this environment requires cultural humility, listening without judgment, and being open to learning from and about others.

3.��Knowledge Democracy: The concept of knowledge democracy is part of a larger discourse on the decolonization of higher education which has disrupted academia’s monopoly on knowledge creation.����of the University of Victoria detailed the principles of knowledge democracy: recognizing multiple epistemologies, including indigenous ways of knowing and being; recognizing multiple ways of representing knowledge, beyond text and statistics, to include arts-based forms of knowledge mobilization; recognizing participatory knowledge as critical to social transformation; and prioritizing open-access publishing and dissemination.

4.��Long-term Reciprocity: When establishing relationships, researchers must be mindful that they need to be in it for the long-term. Parachuting into a community and then appearing to disappear sows mistrust.

A Shared Vision

Once established, these community-campus relationships are deepened as partners align around a shared vision. It is important that all parties agree upon the opportunity or issue to be resolved, a shared understanding of that issue, and an agreed-upon approach for addressing it. A shared framework and strategy creates a sense of common purpose, builds trust amongst participants, and provides coherence to diverse activities. Liz Weaver, co-CEO of the��, pointed out that it is only by unlocking our collaborative potential that we can solve the increasingly complex problems that communities face today.

The Tamarack Institute has a����for developing a collective vision for change.

Equity and Inclusivity

Academics and community groups are on an unequal footing in terms of funding and access to technology and other resources. In the interest of fairness, researchers must strive to be transparent about these inequities and power differentials, and, where possible, address them. In their��mid-term report, CFICE provides the example that post-secondary institutions should move funds for community-based projects in a timely manner to ensure fair treatment of community partners.

Similarly, those involved in community-campus engagement need to be mindful of reducing barriers — attitudinal, geographical, physical, social, and economic — to participation. CCE must be inclusive, reaching out to marginalized and informal communities and bringing together the rural and the urban, east and west, north and south.

Democratic Communication

Isabelle Kim, director of the University of Toronto’s��, spoke about making research findings accessible in terms of both who gets to communicate them and who gets access to them. If community-engaged research results are only communicated via academic language, community partners will be excluded. Story-telling is a vital tool for democratic discourse: all project participants can engage with the results or collaborate in the story-telling itself. The key is to avoid superficial boosterism or university public relations and remain attuned to the complexities of the story and its interpretations.

Community-campus engagement is of growing importance at university campuses around the world. It is also at the heart of what the����at Brandon University does. For all researchers involved in rural issues, developing the capacities to serve in this boundary-spanning CCE role is key. Rural researchers must learn to embrace complexity, conflict, and uncertainty enroute to the realization of shared solutions.

The panel discussion at the heart of this blog post, entitled “Co-Creating the Future of Community-Campus Engagement in Canada,” is available on the��CFICE���ɱ�������ٱ�.

SSRHC provides one-year����for community-campus partnerships that will inform decision-making and serve the needs of one partner outside of the academic sector.

Being ‘community first’ means engaging and involving community partners at all stages of the partnership, even the application process. When the CFICE team was putting together its SSHRC application several years ago, the application process presented one of the first opportunities to put the ‘community first’ ethos into action.

With so many partners involved in CFICE, (at least a dozen universities and 60+ community-based organizations), finding a project design, structure, and common goals across the project posed a challenge, but over the course of the six years of this project, CFICE leaders have learned to put community first through practice.

CFICE spoke to its current Principal Investigator, Peter Andrée, and one of the community partners from the Poverty Reduction Hub, Liz Weaver of Tamarack Institute in Waterloo, to gain their insight into how best to formulate a SSHRC partnership grant application while respectfully involving your community-based organization (CBO) partners.

Sharing ideas at the Ottawa CCE Regional Roundtable.

Start with existing relationships

Before you can think about submitting a SSHRC partnership grant application, you need to know who your partners will be. In CFICE’s case, most community partnerships arose out of pre-existing relationships and networks. CFICE’s original Principal Investigator (PI) Ted Jackson approached the Tamarack Institute, for instance, because he already had a relationship with them from his work in the community development sector.

CFICE Principal Investigator, Peter Andree.

Peter Andrée, the current PI for CFICE, was originally involved in the project as the academic co-lead for the Community Food Security hub. Through his academic research on food security, Andrée had an established network of contacts in that field, and it was through this network that he recruited to be a part of CFICE. Andrée said in an interview that connecting with partners in the early stages of the project “was a bit of an organic process” involving the lead academics and the Canadian Alliance for Community Service Learning (CACSL) drawing on their networks.

While you might begin with relationships you’ve already built, that does not mean that those you first approach will necessarily be the right fit. “The question then becomes how much you can ask of [the community partner],” Andrée says. “It’s often about your networks, but then don’t take that relationship for granted…really try and figure out if this is going to be of value [for them] or not.”

Community partners are often asked to write letters of support in the context of a partnership grant application, but Andrée says this isn’t something you want to ask them for right away. “Rather, you first have to have a conversation about what would be in this for you, and what would be in this for me, and how can we make sure that your time is valued and how can this be reciprocal?” he says.

Those initial conversations, of which there might be several, are the key to hashing out things like the responsibilities involved in the project and the potential benefits for each partner. If it’s a SSHRC partnership grant you’re applying for, don’t forget that the project is a research project at the end of the day.

“While it can serve other ends for community organizations, it ultimately needs to be this knowledge generation, synthesis project, so if that is not of interest to them, then you have to have those conversations early on” in order to determine if the partnership will be a good fit, says Andrée.

Consult partners from the get-go

Liz Weaver, the Co-CEO of the community-based organization the , was a community co-lead in CFICE’s Poverty Reduction hub in Phase I of the project. She says CFICE helped the folks at the Tamarack Institute feel respected and included in the application process by involving them in the initial design of the project.

“I think what was really important was the whole notion of community-first,” Weaver told CFICE in a recent interview. For CFICE, “community-first” means fostering equitable partnerships to co-create knowledge that can then be applied to benefit the community context.

“I felt I was informed at every stage of how the process was moving forward…there were lots of emails back and forth with community partners about where the proposal was at,” Weaver said. Then, when the CFICE project got to the interview stage of the SSHRC proposal, community partners were invited to be a part of that process as well.

As a community partner outside of the academic sphere, Weaver said the SSHRC application itself can be a bit “daunting,” but that “the people at �Ӱ�ԭ�� [University] were quite helpful in terms of navigating [that].”

Exchanging as much information as possible and providing assistance with the application process when needed can make your CBO feel included and involved without feeling overwhelmed.

Align shared goals

As part of those early conversations, ensuring that partners are on the same page as to the broader goals of the project, and what they hope to get out of the project for their individual organization or research, is an important step in ensuring that expectations are aligned.

“Some of what’s implicit in how we work needs to be made explicit, so that everybody understands the parameters that everybody’s working with,” says Andrée. For instance, if an academic partner is looking to get tenure in the next five years, “that’s got to be on the table,” Andrée says. “What do you need to get tenure? If that’s a certain number of publications, how does that fit in with what you’re planning to do with your community partners?” Expectations that might seem like they are outside of the partnership, but that could influence one’s involvement in the project, need to be acknowledged.

Weaver said “the group has to buy into the shared agenda” of the research project, and thought maybe that was something that was lacking within CFICE’s Phase I. “I think we circled around the shared agenda a lot, and then each of the hubs did their own thing,” she said.

Both Weaver and Andrée identified the need to be in partnership with an organization as a whole, rather than just one person within that organization.

“Chances are people who are still doing the work five years later are not the people who started, and so there needs to be an institutional commitment to the value of the work for that organization,” Andrée says.

And, if you do have organizational or institutional support, and you have aligned goals and expectations, Weaver adds that something else to consider is your partners’ state of readiness. “If you want [the project] to get off the ground quickly, then you want to have groups that have good relationships and people who make decisions relatively quickly,” she said.

Negotiate power and governance

Over the course of CFICE, face-to-face meetings have been found to be integral to the success of partnership projects. These meetings allow honest and frank discussions to take place and can be helpful to address more difficult topics such as power imbalances. Weaver says the first face-to-face meeting for all CFICE partners did not happen until after the funding was secured and the logistics and structure of the project was already in place. She suggests that in hindsight, this might have been done differently, so that the main ‘hub’ structure of the CFICE project could have been better communicated to community partners.

While Weaver said community partners might have been more involved in deciding the overall project structure, when it came to the individual hubs, “we were able—both community and academic—to make decisions fairly quickly with the design of that project.” Weaver said the independence that was afforded to the hubs, in her case the Poverty Reduction hub, was helpful to the community partners and allowed them to have a driving voice behind the work.

Identifying areas where community partners will take the lead in terms of decision making and governance, and outlining areas that fall into the academic purview is important to ensure power dynamics are addressed and relationships are as equitable as possible.

For instance, within the SSHRC partnership grant, the PI, an academic, is ultimately responsible for budgeting and management of funds. That means that they will hold a certain degree of power and governance in the project. It is important to acknowledge this role and how it may impact the partnership in the context of these early conversations.

When Natasha Pei got a Research Assistantship (RAship) with the Poverty Reduction hub of CFICE in 2013, she never could have predicted the impact it would have on her career trajectory. She attributes her success, in large part, to the community-first skills she gained as a result.

Listen to the podcast below, or continue scrolling to read the full story! Download a PDF of the podcast transcript.

“When I first started studying social work, I thought I was going to get into child protection services,” explained Natasha. “Learning about systemic issues facing society through my Master’s, combined with my community engagement work with CFICE, broadened my horizons about how I could contribute to addressing the larger, structural barriers people face every day.”

While many RAships entail completing literature reviews, assisting with data entry, and occasionally contributing to academic articles, Natasha’s RAship with CFICE was focused on studying and building the skills necessary for creating deep and meaningful partnerships between communities and academics.

“Like many students starting in community engagement work, I was eager to share what I’d learned in university to help solve community issues,” said Natasha. “My experience with CFICE taught me how to listen to and learn from the expertise in the community, and how to develop long-term relationships that lead to far greater change.”

The experience gave Natasha skills that set her apart from her fellow Master’s students.

“I was a core member of the team,” Natasha recalled fondly. “I helped organize meetings. I liaised with multiple community and academic partners from across Canada, presenting our research information back to the community members to discuss implications with them. Where other students were reading about community engagement models like collective impact, I was actually part of collective impact projects. It was a lot of responsibility but it was a great experience.”

Pei graduated her Master’s of Social Work degree with a job waiting for her at Tamarack Institute’s Vibrant Communities, a core partner of CFICE’s Poverty Reduction Hub. And her CFICE experience didn’t stop there.

“I transitioned straight from being an RA for CFICE’s Poverty Reduction hub to being the hub’s community co-lead! It was great because I brought continuity to the projects, and I’ve been able to apply what I’ve learned, both in my position at Vibrant Communities, as well as with my ongoing work as part of CFICE.”

Patricia Ballamingie and Natasha Pei at the CFICE Community Impact Symposium, January 2017.

Through her co-lead position, Natasha has continued studying effective ways to maximize the benefits of community-campus engagement for the community. She has also witnessed firsthand the impact of using a community-first approach in engagement, especially in her position as Community Animator with Vibrant Communities.

“You can actually see the difference this work makes for our community partners. So often in social work, you put your heart and soul into helping people escape poverty or homelessness. With this job, I am in the privileged position of helping people pass knowledge back and forth so people can build the work from each other, and do work more effectively to move policy and systems, as a result of our conversations.”

When asked how CFICE’s community-first ethos has changed her expectations and methods as a community partner, Natasha responded, “When we’re engaging other community members, asking them to share their experience and expertise, we take the time to truly listen to and learn about the issues that they are facing. We are prepared to meet them where they’re at, rather than imposing our own assumptions.”

Natasha encourages other students to learn community-first practices as well.

“For students working with communities, it’s incredibly important to start by looking inwards, to value the community’s perspective, and then identify how your role can best contribute to bigger relationship and overall goals.”

Become more community-first!

To learn more about how to make your work more community-first, check out our list of actions for all community-campus engagement practitioners!

What is Collective Impact?

Collective Impact is the model for effecting change embraced by the Poverty Reduction Hub’s community partners. Kania and Kramer coined the term Collective Impact in 2011, which includes five core strategies:

• a common agenda,
• shared measurement,
• mutually reinforcing activities,
• continuous communications,
• and a backbone infrastructure.

When the Poverty Reduction (PR) Hub’s partner, Vibrant Communities’ local partners formed poverty reduction roundtables, the five conditions of collective impact were intuitively in place. identified a shared approach, and each community developed a local strategy based on a common “agenda” design. The communities created a shared measurement framework that tracked progress not only locally, but also at the pan-Canadian level. Vibrant Communities formed the backbone infrastructure of the Poverty Reduction Hub.

Employing Collective Impact in the Poverty Reduction Hub?

The first unofficial step of the process was to build our relationship. The community co-lead and I had what I consider an ‘arranged partnership’. We needed to take the time to see how our personalities, goals, and work style fit with one another. As we both lived in different cities, we took the time to commute to each other’s work spaces as a way to enhance the conversation, equalize power, and learn each other’s professional lingo.

Our first step was to establish a common agenda through ongoing conversations between the two of us. Once we had agreed on funding demonstration projects driven by Vibrant Communities’ members, while exploring their models of community campus engagement (CCE), we brought the agenda to the broader PR Hub for their input, review, and buy-in. This began our tradition of continuous communication where the hub co-leads make decisions equally, and regularly communicate them to project partners at monthly conference calls.

Due to the vast distance between our project partners, once a year, the entire PR Hub would gather for a face-to-face meeting. We have rotated cities each time so that we learn about each other’s projects in a tangible, hands-on way.�� We would review the progress of the demonstration projects and discuss our on-going investigations into models of community campus engagement. These became our mutually reinforcing activities. We enjoyed our times together and made progress toward our goals.

The final strategy in collective impact is shared measurement. Annually, during the face-to-face meetings, project participants were asked to describe their relationships, and reflect on how their models had changed. This process, facilitated by internal evaluators and hub co-leaders, allowed participants to discuss, challenge, and weave narratives to accompany the visual representations of community campus partnerships around poverty reduction.

As a result, the narratives and visual representations of CCE, generated by our poverty reduction partners, can be used by other communities that seek a model or wish to build a specific community campus strategy of their own.

Collective Impact is an important tool for facilitating community campus engagement in order to have an impact on an important policy issue like reducing poverty. For more information please visit and .

Please visit for more information.

Volunteer Canada recognizes Liz Weaver for her contributions to volunteerism in Canada at the Healthy, Resilient Communities Conference May 2014.

Campus community research partnerships are exciting and challenging, says Liz Weaver, Vice-President of . For the last three years, Liz also co-led the poverty reduction hub of Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement, or .

Under her co-leadership, the hub researched big issues in poverty, including living wage, the stigma of poverty and access to post-secondary education. Now, Liz is leaving CFICE to take on a new role at Tamarak, directing its .

All at CFICE would like to thank Liz for her wonderful work with the poverty hub, and congratulate her on her new position.

“I particularly appreciated the way Liz promoted CFICE, her generosity sharing her knowledge, and her commitment to improving the infrastructure for community campus partners to progress together towards a more just and equitable society,”��says Geri Briggs, co-manager of CFICE and director of the .

“Liz really understood the pressures and goals of campuses, while being deeply rooted in the community. That meant she was able to effectively translate the needs of campuses to community groups and facilitate strong relationships,” says Karen Schwartz, Associate Dean of Research & Graduate Affairs, Faculty of Public Affairs, �Ӱ�ԭ�� University. “Liz is a great problem solver – she’s very clear-thinking and gets to the root of an issue right away,” adds Schwartz.

Liz Weaver shared her parting insights on working in campus community partnerships:

• “A lot of this work is based on fragile relationships, because people come and go,” Liz explains. “You have to dive deeper than just one-to-one connections and create resilient relationships that span broader communities.”

• Academics and students tend to work on an eight-month calendar, which presents challenges for community organizations that work year-round, she says. “There’s also more bureaucracy within large institutions like universities, so we have to figure out how to navigate the system,” she adds.

• More than anything, it’s challenging for stakeholders to carve out the time for campus-community partnerships. “Everybody does this off the side of their desks, and despite best intentions, these partnerships often compete with all of our other priorities,” says Liz.

• It’s also critical to realize that campus and community have different goals, says Liz. Campus partners emphasize teaching, learning and discussion, while community partners focus on engagement and policy change. ��“They aren’t necessarily competing; they can be complementary agendas,” says Liz. “But they are different agendas, and it’s vital to recognize those differences and find the mutuality of purpose.”

• Moving forward, Liz sees a trend in community work, with more activity at the cross-community level, as opposed to individual program and services. ��“In many communities, we reinvent the wheel over and over and over again. So, Tamarack is trying to figure out strategies for the co-generation of knowledge for social change,” she says. Liz believes campus-community partnerships are an intriguing opportunity to research the systematic issues in poverty and key identify barriers.

As Tamarack wraps up the 1000 Conversations Campaign as a stand-alone project, we are documenting the project and its findings in a Report that will be available soon.

Into the future Tamarack will be continuing to explore and deepen our understanding of community and will also continue to partner
with local communities to host��Community Conversations as part of Deepening Community, a movement focused on building a shared understanding of the unique role of community as a driver for social change.��The learnings gleaned from the��1,000 Conversations Campaign will inform and shape this work. Learn more at: .

This final newsletter of the 1,000 Conversations Campaign reviews the 200+ conversations that have been held and documented in order to identify and profile actions that help to build and foster a deeper sense of community.

In this Issue…

• Insights for Deepening Community

• Self-Awareness and Self-Care
• The Need and Value of Storytelling
• Habits and Rituals That Weave Us Together
• Opportunities to Shift Culture

• 1,000 Conversations Wrap-Up: Where to From Here?
• Campaign Animator Closing Reflections

Thank you for joining us in this journey to, together, learn how to deepen and strengthen community. We are very excited about the next chapter in Tamarack’s ongoing work to make community a central organizing principle and a guiding force for positive social change.��To continue learning with us, become a member of the����learning community.

The Story of The Seed:

Working Together for Food Justice in Guelph

Hosted by:��

THURSDAY MAY 22, 2014 FROM 1:00 PM TO 2:00 PM ET

Join us to hear how a coalition of community partners in Guelph, Ontario have come together to create – a project informed by local research and community consultation, and inspired by the This webinar is part of a series offered through a collaboration between Food Secure Canada and �Ӱ�ԭ�� University on the (Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement).

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Partnerships Towards Food Self-Sufficiency��

Growing Change in Northern Manitoba

Hosted by:��

THURSDAY MAY 29, 2014 FROM 1:00 PM TO 2:00 PM ET

Join us for this webinar to learn how the Government of Manitoba is working in partnership with to increase access to healthy, local��foods in Northern Manitoba. This webinar is being presented as part of FSC’s.

NRC- Students’ Packed Lunches in Balanced School Day and Traditional Schools:

How do they differ?

Hosted by:��

THURSDAY MAY 8, 2014 FROM 12:00 PM TO 1:00 PM ET

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Take part in this webinar by OPHA’s Nutrition Resource Centre and learn about The Balanced School Day (BSD), a grassroots policy change that��provides children with two 20-minute eating opportunities versus the traditional 20-minute lunch. The presenters will discuss the BSD, which��has been widely implemented across Ontario schools,��and present data on the packed lunch intake of children in the BSD versus��the traditional elementary��school schedule (TS).

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Evaluating Collective Impact:��

6 Simple Rules

Hosted by:��

THURSDAY MAY 15, 2014 FROM 11:55 AM TO 1:00 PM ET

This Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) webinar, led by two experienced community change practitioners, will explore how to assess collective impact efforts. Topics covered will include examples of collective impact evaluation in action, and implications for practitioners, funders and evaluators.

NRC- Youth On Track For Health:��

Making the Healthy Choice the Easy Choice in Local Youth Group Homes

Hosted by:��

THURSDAY MAY 15, 2014 FROM 12:00 T0 1:00 PM ET

This webinar, presented by OPHA’s Nutrition Resource Centre, will share the challenges and successes of a pilot project which used , a��manual which provides guidelines to improve the nutrition environment in residential settings.

Join this Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCEDNet) webinar to learn about innovative models for building resilient local economies – including and

This June 2-4 the will host Evaluating Community Impact: Capturing and Making Sense of Community Outcomes, a multi-day interactive workshop in Halifax, NS, designed specifically for leaders who have basic evaluation training and a desire to take their community change efforts to the next level. This dynamic learning experience will be led by Liz Weaver, Vice-President of the Tamarack Institute and Mark Cabaj, President of Here to There Consulting, who together possess a wealth of hands-on experience working with and supporting collaborative, community change initiatives across North America.

Participants of the workshop will gain a deep understanding and appreciation of the dynamic nature of community change. Key themes addressed in the workshop will include:

• Models and dynamics of community change including Theory of Change

• The core concepts of evaluative thinking, utilization focused evaluation, and developmental evaluation
• The critical differences between traditional program evaluation and the evaluation of community change evaluation
• The unique��challenges of assessing community change e.g. ‘measuring’ systems change, dealing with unanticipated outcomes, attributing outcomes to change activities, and participatory sense-making
• Evaluation Planning Tools e.g. evaluation scope of work, utilization-focused checklist, developmental evaluation checklist
• Outcome Evaluation Tools e.g. Most Significant Change, contribution analysis, multiple perspectives exercise, outcome mapping, splash and rippleSubsidies are available for colleagues who enroll together. To learn more or register your team for this workshop, please visit the Evaluating Community Impact website at .

  Questions? Please contact: Kirsti@tamarackcommunity.ca.