Engaging Transformation: Creating and Realizing a Community Driven Research Program

Abstract

Our oral presentation reports on the underpinnings and process of creating and realizing a collaborative community-driven research program. The Wellington Guelph Drug Strategy (WGDS) is a coalition of over 30 partner agencies and members of the lived experience community, who are working together to implement an evidence-based approach to addressing critical social issues related to substance use and misuse. Evidence-based policy decisions and turning policy into practice requires ongoing access to research. Beginning in summer 2010, the WGDS has partnered with the Research Shop at the University of Guelph to shape a multi-stage research program designed to support the policies and practices of the WGDS. Here we report on key mechanisms for engagement and bidirectional knowledge mobilization. Under a research program collaboratively shaped by WGDS members and Research Shop staff, graduate student interns from the Research Shop work with the WGDS to provide research capacity in the form of policy briefs, literature scans, “rapid response” research, and comprehensive qualitative investigation. This presentation considers the impact of such engaged research programs from the perspective of community partners, graduate student interns, and staff people working to balance research capacity with research demands. The presentation will use the recent Youth Harm Reduction Programs in Ontario Expansion Report as an example of one product of this collaboration. Using audience participation, we will discuss the ways in which this community-university partnership organization has challenged and expanded upon our conceptualizations of the content and possibilities of research. Further, we will explore the ways in which this collaboration engaged transformation both with the community and the university. In particular, we will use the presentation as an opportunity to precipitate and prompt audience reflections about the transformative potential of engaging in community-university partnerships.