Wondering what the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project has been up to for the past four years? Well you’re in luck. We just completed and submitted our SSHRC Midterm report on February 29, 2016 and it’s chock full of details about CFICE’s activities and learnings from Phase I!
Closing the Loop: Community Engaged Pedagogy in Business Courses is a CACSL and Carleton Raven’s Den-funded CFICE evaluation project that looks at the impact on Sprott School of Business’s community partners of adopting a community service learning approach to pedagogy.
Over a number of years and across a variety of courses, Sprott has implemented projects ranging in duration and topic in order to facilitate a ‘practice’ perspective for the students in Sprott’s Bachelor of Commerce and Bachelor of International Business programs. Sprott has received lots of feedback from students, in the form of anecdotal accounts and more structured feedback exercises, and some feedback from community partners, but mostly the latter was limited to student performance during the actual project and anticipated benefits should the organization adopt the recommendations made by the student teams. Sprott therefore undertook this study to determine the impact their CSL projects made on community partners over a longer term.
This project is still ongoing, with evaluations scheduled for the Fall/Winter term from 2016 – 2017.
Completed for: Peterborough GreenUP , Supervising Professor: Tom Whillans; Trent Centre for Community-Based Education
Abstract:
An urban food forest is modelled after a wild forest, but is intentionally designed and planted with food production in mind. Essentially an urban food forest is a combination of wild forest and orchard. They are made up of a close-knit community of plants that help each other. There are many benefits that an urban food forest can provide. They can improve the environment we live in; help build stronger, more resilient, communities; and can provide a host of economic benefits as well. Urban food forests help us create more sustainable communities that are healthy and enjoyable to live in.
We need to rediscover our past, when we cultivated urban forests, not just for the services they provided, but also for the products as well. It is not just rural forests that can provide useable products. In fact it might even be argued that urban forests can be more productive, per unit of area, because of the intentional planning and design that goes into them. An urban food forest is a community within a community, the plants help and support one another, just as we help support one another in our communities.
Completed for: Peterborough GreenUP Professor Tom Whillans, Trent University Trent Centre for Community-Based Education
Abstract:
This document is a compilation of research reports written by students in the Environmental
Resource Studies/Science (ERTS) 3160H class at Trent University in the winter of 2014. The
research was completed in conjunction with GreenUP, Trent Centre for Community-Based
Education (TCCBE), and Taylor Mackey (a graduate student research assistant in Trent’s
Sustainability Studies program). The students looked critically at urban food forests around the
world and made suggestions for designing a food forest in Peterborough. These reports will help
inform this process alongside a report written by Taylor Mackey as part of his research
assistanceship: An Urban Food Forest for Peterborough: Planting for Our Future.
An urban food forest is an area in a city or town where trees, and often other plants, are
intentionally planted for food production. These urban food forests often attempt to mimic
natural ecosystems. Currently urban forests are generally considered valuable solely for the
ecosystem services they provide, such as stormwater management. In the past these urban
forests were often managed for the products they produced, rather than just the services they
could provide.
There is increasing interest in creating edible landscapes in urban areas. Some are starting to see
urban forests as more than something that can clean the air or reduce the stormwater runoff.
Some are starting to see the potential to create areas that can provide these services as well as
produce food for human consumptions, as well as a host of other benefits. Most of the studied
urban food forests focus on food security. Urban food forests have the potential to provide the
same services as our current urban forests, but also produce food (and perhaps increase
biodiversity in the process).
Completed for: Abbey Gardens & Peterborough GreenUP; Supervising Professor: Tom Whillans; Trent Centre for Community-Based Education
Abstract:
Finding Common Ground for Facilitating Collaborative Partnerships stemmed from a desire among several employees of Peterborough GreenUP and Abbey Gardens to explore the potential for collaboration between both organizations. In the winter of 2014, planning began for a meeting between members of GreenUP and Abbey Gardens facilitated by Trent graduate students in the Sustainability Studies program through the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) project and Trent Centre for Community Based Education (TCCBE). What this meeting would look like and what would be discussed evolved over the next few weeks and culminated in a daylong workshop in Bobcaygeon on April 1st, 2014.
This report summarizes the main ideas that came up in several activities and presentations. It contains resources on the background of the project, next steps, and the contact information of participants from both organizations. Appendices include the presentation slides from the respective organizations presentations, staff lists and contact information for each organization, and detailed activity notes from the workshop.
This report highlights the lack of action from ministries and organizations to help end violence against women, created by Action Research Change with the support of CFICE’s Violence Against Women Hub.