University of Guelph

The Initiative on Community Engaged Scholarship (ICES) in the College of Social & Applied Human Sciences at the University of Guelph works to strengthen engagement with local, national and international communities of interest.  Through partnerships and collaboration in mutually beneficial research endeavours, we build and support collaborations that use community expertise and academic scholarship.  We work across and beyond disciplinary boundaries, emphasizing civic responsibility and stewardship of resources, and mobilizing knowledge towards social transformation. This work includes capacity building for students, faculty and support for community endeavours, including new graduate courses, support for undergraduate teaching, and attention to strategies around supporting faculty development in reward, recognition and development of their community engaged work.  

We have now opened the “Research Shop” , in keeping with the socially responsive “science shop” model common in Europe and the UK, to serve as a broker between the needs of local and regional communities of interest in navigating complex social problems. We are prototyping multiple activities and processes in 2010 to be evaluated by community and university collaborators, with successful initiatives to form the foundation of future ICES/Research Shop activities. Examples of activities include:

• A community-commissioned environmental scan of collaborations, planning groups and priorities is underway in Guelph Wellington
• 10 Graduate student interns from across 5 disciplines have joined the Research Shop, doing “intake” of community research questions and mediating the process of curricular response, with capture of larger projects suitable for PhD thesis work or faculty research
• Facilitation of community research agendas, most particularly work to support emerging and established collaborations and communities of practice in using research to meet their change goals
• The Rapid Response initiative now being piloted with the Guelph-Wellington Poverty Elimination Task Force, providing direct report to agencies planning activities and programs through detailed community specific research summaries on local food security, housing, income security and health. Rapid Response is conducted in a 2-4 week turnaround to better inform short term decision making
• The development of an innovative model of interdisciplinary problem solving in which complex issues are met by a coherent and integrated response across disciplines and across institutional silos by an engaged cohort of PhD students  
• Support for the development of knowledge translation and mobilization activities, promotion & tenure criteria recognizing community engaged scholarship and dossier building workshops