University of Guelph

The Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship/The Research Shop 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.

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.

The Research Shop has 30 students, across nine disciplines, and supports three groups or "tables" of graduate students who link with community organizations and collaborations through research and knowledge mobilization activities. Interns meet every 2-3 weeks at the Research Shop to discuss project plans and concerns around negotiating with partners, methods, ethics or other CES concerns, and to link across projects and methods.

Interns receive support through occasional professional development activities, and are mentored through the involvement of senior PhD students and staff, who act as project managers in more complex projects. All complex projects have a faculty/staff member serving as principal investigator. Interns conduct what we refer to as rapid response research for community partners keen on a quick turnaround to research questions, as well as research planning for more complex questions, conceptualizing, and partnership building activities. Some interns may work as embedded researchers in community collaborations, to identify broad research agendas, and serve both as a link to research expertise on campus (faculty interests; other graduate students) and as researchers on particular projects.

Examples of activities at Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship/ The Research Shop include:

• A community-commissioned environmental scan of collaborations, planning groups and priorities is underway in Guelph Wellington
• 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 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
• Working with ResearchImpact partners to expand the plain language summaries throughout University of Guelph and beyond.