Post Cards from Congress – Day 2

Day 2 was a day of connecting and re-connecting.

We first welcomed Bojan Fürst to the ResearchImpact-RéseauImpactRecherche booth at Congress.  In 2011, Bojan joined the Harris Centre at Memorial University of Newfoundland and Labrador as manager of Knowledge Mobilization. You can read more about Bojan in the Harris Centre’s newsletter The Regional.  In Bojan’s words, “As a manager of knowledge mobilization my job is to connect the needs of Newfoundland and Labrador communities and regions with the expertise that resides at Memorial. I am essentially a matchmaker and my tool of trade is our opportunity, research and expertise online database yaffle.ca. Yaffle is a true repository of ingenuity in this province. It is an essential component of a network of economic development practitioners, policy makers, experts, students and community champions. Yaffle would not be what it is without its users, so I do encourage all of you to register an account, and make it stronger with your own expertise and innovative ideas added to our collective knowledge.” Yaffle has been featured in a number of stories in Mobilize This! and we are pleased and proud to have a Yaffle banner and a Yaffle expert in the RIR booth.

Welcome Bojan, who fits right in not just as a knowledge broker but as someone who is always laughing and enjoying life.

Reconnecting with colleagues is always a joy of Congress. SSHRC, Canadian Federation of Humanities and Social Sciences, Centre for Community Based Research… all great colleagues who are great to reconnect to and are great knowledge mobilization colleagues you need to know to help connect your research with non-academic partners.

Don’t forget to save the dates of June 12-15, 2013, in Corner Brook Newfoundland for the next Community-University Expo.

Meet Karen Follett, KMb Coordinator at The Harris Centre

The following blog story was first published in The Harris Centre’s newsletter The Regional, Fall 2011. It is reposted here with permission.

When I started with the Harris Centre three years ago, I remember being very confused at my first meeting by the onslaught of acronyms and strange terms. KMb, brokering, knowledge transfer, stakeholder, lay summary, Yaffle. Even my title seemed daunting: Knowledge Mobilization Coordinator.

So, how exactly was I supposed to coordinate the movement of knowledge? When you boil it down, my job is to connect the university with the rest of the province.

Thankfully, I soon got the hang of it, becoming fluent in “community engagement” speak and getting to work on bringing Memorial expertise into Newfoundland and Labrador communities.

The thing I love most about my job is it’s never boring. Some days I help a non-profit group enter their research needs into Yaffle, our online research database, and then help find a match for them at the university. Then there are the days I get to travel with researchers to a remote community in a twin otter airplane.

One of the most exciting ways I connect people is by bringing people together face-to-face through workshops and other events. I could open up my own travel agency with the knowledge I’ve gained in planning logistics with the Harris Centre. We bring Memorial faculty, staff and students into different regions and communities of the province to interact with community leaders and decision makers.

It’s amazing what you learn and experience by leaving the university environment and going into a community to talk with residents about their real-world issues.

The thing that keeps me on my toes is problem solving and learning from others on-the-job. For example, I could never have been taught in school the lessons I learned when I had to get a group back to St. John’s (including myself), and were met with weather delays in Nain, Labrador during one of our workshops.

I’m also thankful for the lesson I learned about sharing knowledge: it sometimes comes from unexpected places. I now know that those inside the university community gain as much knowledge and experience from community-university engagement as do those from outside the university.

Please feel free to contact me with your questions or projects at kfollett@mun.ca – I’m here to help!

Karen

The Harris Centre launches The Regional / Le Harris Centre lance The Regional

ResearchImpact – Réseau Impact Recherche member The Harris Centre at Memorial University has launched a new quarterly newsletter called The Regional. Here is an excerpt from the first edition.

Le Harris Centre, membre du Réseau Impact Recheche – ResearchImpact vient de lancer une nouvelle infolettre trimestrielle appelée “The Regional”. Voici un extrait de la première édition.

Welcome to the first edition of The Regional! We’re excited to share some of the stories happening in our province.

When my family and I decided to move to Newfoundland and Labrador some three years ago, there were many raised eyebrows. Friendly advice ranged from warnings that the weather is unpleasant, to the ominous statements that “that place is going to hell in a hand basket, and that everybody with their head screwed on right is leaving for the greener pastures.”

Not that it matter much what they said.

We landed in St. John’s in 2008 and found a vibrant, welcoming community and blueberry covered hills. Our two-year-old couldn’t believe her luck.

Six months ago I landed the best job at Memorial University – manager of knowledge mobilization with the Harris Centre. It sounds like a mouthful, but don’t forget that this is academia you are dealing with – we never miss a chance to make simple things sound complicated. The job, and I’ll tell you a bit more about it, came with a major perk – I get to see Newfoundland and Labrador through a whole new lens of people who work across the province to make their communities and regions successful.

Read the rest of the newsletter here.