About
- About the Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship
- About the Research Shop
- ICES and Research Shop History
About the Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship
The Institute for Community Engaged Scholarship (ICES) fosters collaborative and mutually beneficial community-university research partnerships. ICES draws on strong traditions of community engagement and socially responsive research within the College of Social and Applied Human Sciences (CSAHS) at the University of Guelph.
ICES builds capacity for community-engaged scholarship by strengthening faculty and student engagement with local, national and international communities of interest, addressing faculty reward development, and training faculty and students in knowledge mobilization.
About the Research Shop
The Research Shop serves as a portal between community and university research needs. Faculty and students work with community organizations and individuals to identify and address social problems, and develop policies for positive change.
Currently, the Research Shop focuses on working with collaborations in Guelph and Wellington by developing community-based research, placing students for service learning, and knowledge mobilization.
Research Shop Vision
We envision a community of engaged citizens who create and use research knowledge and experience to achieve positive social change.
ICES and Research Shop History
Work on the Institute for Community-Engaged Scholarship and the Research Shop began in January 2009.
To date, work has included:
- Supporting the development of promotion and tenure criteria for doing community-engaged work, a survey of faculty on community-engaged scholarship in teaching, service and research, and facilitation of new research ideas with individual faculty.
- Daylong events to identify and clarify models and mechanisms for engagement, including the Community-Campus Dialogue: Building a Research Shop organized by representatives from community and campus
- Formation of a Research Shop Governing Group that includes on-campus representatives and the executive directors of Immigrant Settlement Services, Trellis Mental Health, the United Way, the Volunteer Centre, the rural Community Resource Centre (North & Central Wellington), 10 Carden Street (Guelph’s innovation centre) and Action Read Literacy. The Group is developing a community impact plan to measure its success.
- A community-commissioned environmental scan of collaborations, planning groups and priorities. This work is funded by one partner, with results and analyses tailored to multiple community-based organizations’ needs.
- Graduate student interns from six disciplines doing “intake” of community research questions and mediating the process of curricular response, with capture of larger projects suitable for PhD or Master’s thesis work.
- 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 research summaries on local food security, housing, income security and health. Rapid Response is conducted in a 2-4 week turnaround to better inform 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.
- A social network for local community based research, found at www.cbrguelph.ning.com