Thirty four mobilizers walk into a bar…

SSHRC invited 34 knowledge mobilization projects from their Knowledge Impact in Society and SSHRC Clusters to a workshop in Ottawa October 22-23.

Day 1: Not being challenged by systemic introversion our mob of mobilizers (mostly academic leaders, some project coordinators and two lone staff leading institutional knowledge mobilization services at York and Memorial) had no problem mashing up in different combinations be it in their KIS or Cluster cohort or the sector of primary engagement. Most of the day was spent exploring “issues” around knowledge mobilization. The usual topics of incentives, barriers, metrics & evaluation were on the agenda. Refreshingly some new topics including an alleged research/KM dichotomy and social media were also discussed.

Research vs KM got a lot of play with opinions on both sides of and in between the hypotheses that research and KM are either on a spectrum of activities or they are two sides of a coin, related but separate. ResearchImpact works with researchers, their institutions and their non academic research collaborators to create space for basic research AND space for applied research linking to extra academic impact (thank you Clair Donovan) as well as a spectrum of activities and services in between. KM is a process intimately interwoven with research. It is not a discrete event that happens in isolation of the research. Measures of extra academic impact complement, they do not conflict, with measures of academic quality. A repeated theme was the desire for infrastructure (cash, expertise, systems) to support the spectrum between basic research and extra academic impact.

Also interesting was a breakout session on social media. ResearchImpact tweeted @researchimpact during this session resulting in a number of RTs and DMs – on the spot web 2.0 mobilization of knowledge about knowledge mobilization. SSHRC, our academic researchers and their non-academic research collaborators only need to look at their graduate students to see how social media will play an increasingly important role. You don’t have to lead the wave but if you don’t ride it, it will pass you by.

York is definitely leading the wave. With a total of 5 engaged research and knowledge mobilization projects York has by far the best representation of any Canadian university at this meeting. ResearchImpact was pleased to be joined by Canadian Homeless Research Network, Canadian Refugee Research Network, Canadian Business Ethics Research Network and the Toronto Employment Immigrant Data Initiative.

Reception done. Dinner done. Blog written. Beer being consumed thanks to Southern Cross Grill. Need to recharge before day 2 of this important workshop. Thank you SSHRC for creating this space where 34 mobilizers could walk into a bar and begin to network. Trouble was it was a cash bar and alcohol is not an eligible expense on a SSHRC grant even though it is a key success factor in networking and knowledge mobilization! Maybe we’ll make that a recommendation for future program development.

York’s Special Research Edition of YorkU Magazine Looks Back on KM as We Look Forward to More

Last week York published its special Research Edition of York U, the magazine of York University. This edition of YorkU features many stories of only a few of the great researchers we have at York but KM was up front and personal. KM was featured in the welcome from VP Research & Innovation, Stan Shapson and the introduction from Sam Schwartz, Chair of the Board Academic Resources Committee. President Shoukri linked KM right back to York’s mission statement illustrating the foundational role KM plays between the university and its non-academic research stakeholders, “Knowledge is of no benefit to anyone if it sits on a shelf. The greatest responsibility of the university is to mobilize that knowledge – to share it with the community and the world to help solve the problems we face, to improve competitiveness, to increase prosperity.”

KM at York started in 2005 with a CIHR/SSHRC Intellectual Property Mobilization grant to York and our KM partner University of Victoria. Working from two other SSHRC grants we have also received support from York’s Division of Vice-President Research & Innovation as well as important financial support from our partners, York Region District School Board and Regional Municipality of York. Money is nice but partnership is essential. Over the last 4 years we have worked with over 100 different community and government agencies who have worked with York faculty and graduate students. Some of our strong supporters have helped out on our Joint Advisory Committee and the United Way of York Region permeates our existence in a mutually supportive fashion.

York’s KM Unit has brokered a number of relationships that continue to grow. President Shoukri mentioned some of these including a few we have previously written about such as Mobilizing Minds and a partnership between Stephen Gaetz’ Homeless Hub and Bernie Pauly of UVic. These are but two of the 155 partnerships we have brokered since 2005. That’s good but not good enough. We continue to work with local organizations seeking to engage with York research. We have a great relationship with the MITACS ACCELERATE Program to fund graduate interns working with decision maker organizations. We are piloting social networking tools for research and knowledge mobilization. We are poised to double our library of ResearchSnapshot research summaries and we are seeking to add other universities and communities to ResearchImpact, Canada’s knowledge mobilization network.

That’s what we’ve done but let us know how we’re doing. Tell us how wonderful we are or how we can do better using the comment feature above. To help us grow and meet your needs better we shall soon be sending you and all our KM community a survey about our web based services. Thanks for helping us grow.

Read the YorkU Magazine articles here. And to read the whole Special Research Edition 2010 of YorkU, click here.

One Giant (Annual) Leap for York’s KM Unit

The following is a guest blog from Jason Guriel. A Research Assistant in the Knowledge Mobilization Unit at York University, Jason works to summarize and communicate the results of York research. He is also a PhD Candidate in English at York and has published two collections of poems.

Jason Guriel

Working with the Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit at York University has been my summer gig for the past few years. Most of the time, I’m a PhD candidate in the Department of English, which means I do some teaching, mark up student papers, and read piles of books (in February I took the last of the comprehensive exams for which I had to read the piles). But come May, when I rejoin the KM Unit, my thoughts turn, as a young man’s will, to the mobilization-of-knowledge-for-the-purpose-of-maximizing-the-impact-of-research-on-policy-among-other-things. And I return to something closer to what I think of as the real world: a 9-5 schedule and a packed lunch.

But here’s the interesting thing about this annual ritual: because I don’t usually visit the KM offices while I’m in school and, therefore, don’t witness much of its day to day goings-on throughout the year, the KM Unit, when I finally rejoin it every May, always seems dramatically different, as things will do when they’ve had a year to evolve incrementally, quietly, out of sight. I rejoin it only to discover: my beard-less manager of last summer has grown a beard; the research summaries I toiled over are now online; the blog that was a dream of yesteryear has an actual URL; and the KM Unit itself is no longer a tenuous experiment, with a grant, and housed in a tiny office but, rather, is a successful experiment, with a budget and, well, okay, still housed in that tiny office (but we’re moving; we’re getting there; we’re, you know, mobilizing). This has been one of the more gratifying aspects of my relationship with the KM Unit at York: experiencing its evolution as an annual leap forward (of course, it may not look this way to those who are here all year, in the trenches, but that’s how the evolution looks to me, from my perspective, checking in, as I do, every summer).

It’s a strange gig, then, because (unlike other kinds of seasonal jobs) I never know quite what I’m returning to, but I know enough to expect to be pleasantly surprised; to expect that the KM Unit will be more substantial than it was the summer before. In other words, the KM Unit keeps expanding outward, keeps building capacity, keeps working to connect some of Canada’s best researchers to a larger community of researchers, practitioners, and decision-makers. It keeps mobilizing stuff. I feel privileged, as ever, to have some small part in all of this. And I’ll look forward to being pleasantly surprised again, next summer, by the next leap forward.

KM into My Future

The following is a guest blog posting from YorkU 4th year undergraduate student Andrei Sedoff. Andrei has worked in the YorkU KM Unit for the past 2 summers and throughout the academic year and has worked on the development of our clear language research summaries, which can be found on our web site here.

Andrei Sedoff

Being part of the KM Unit at York has been a profound learning experience for me. I have many important lessons from KM to take with me into the working world. KM is much more than just an acronym that you find difficult to describe to friends and family (a common question from friends is: “you do what to knowledge?”). It is a powerful toolkit for engaging knowledge in today’s plugged-in workplace. KM creates the space where we can pause and reflect on the meaning of all the information we are constantly bombarded with. This adds value to all the volume. I look forward to applying the concepts I learned from my work with the KM Unit after graduating. It is still unclear to me exactly where I want to build my career, but I aspire to work in international affairs. I feel that the multifaceted nature of KM is a good fit with wanting to have the world as your workplace. I think that any job that deals with international matters embodies the values practiced in KM, especially the focus on collaboration.

No global task may be successfully tackled by any one individual. Seeing problems through the KM lens has always encouraged me to partner with as many people as possible when tackling a challenge. I also think that my experience with KM’s unyielding desire to find innovative solutions will carry over into my future career. I want to apply the KM mindset to look at a problem from multiple angles and be unafraid to try a new approach. Most importantly, I feel that the KM approach has really helped me be able to simply pause and reflect. With the modern supercharged pace of any workplace, reflection is a precious luxury. I hope that I can preserve this feature in my future jobs. I am also really excited to have the opportunity to promote KM outside of York. While working for the KM Unit at York, I have met many of our community, research, and government partners. Virtually everyone I have met has been an enthusiastic ambassador for the KM model. I am excited to promote this model to colleagues in any future workplace.

The Third Annual KM at York Summit

Professional Development and Team Building are activities which, when done properly, can be quite enjoyable!  The staff of York’s KM Unit recently participated in their third annual KM Summit.  Objectives of the Summit are:  fun, exploring theoretical and operational challenges for KM, fun, acknowledging the contributions of summer student staff, did I mention fun?  We’re nothing if not a work hard/play hard group.  On August 19, the KM staff took a half day trip to the Toronto Islands.  The professional task for the day was brainstorming a better term than ’social innovation’ to define the range of impacts that are enabled by KM.  And what better venue to get the creative juices flowing than Centre Island in Toronto, where lunch on a patio overlooking the harbourfront, a walk through the Far Enough Zoo (or is it Fair Enough Zoo?), a necessary stop for ice-cream and an addition to David’s pen collection were the activities of the afternoon.  Of course, we failed to realize we would be the only group of adults who would not be pushing strollers or supervising grade school campers.  Still, it beat a February Summit at the Toronto Islands!

Some lessons from the day:

- A Summit which lacks competitive physical activity (Summit I – golf; Summit II – bowling) was a welcome change

- An iPod Touch serves as an excellent dictionary/thesaurus and diversion (on occassion) from professional development tasks

- The Island Ferry may wish to consider a BYO Lifejacket policy for the peak season.  Just an observation.

- What is the difference between Smoked Meat and Corned Beef?

- Social Innovation is a challenging term to deconstruct

- The KM Summit IV may launch into a formal debate on poetry and its movement into mainstream literature

- Oddly, a split rail fence can keep a 500-lb hog and a 400 lb sow, who clearly want to be together, apart

- While we have advanced our thinking and understanding of KM, we need to maintain clear messages about what is KM, who we are, what we do, and why we feel this is important, and,

- This is an amazing team of students and professionals who are passionate about their work and who enjoy working together as a team

O3 Open House

Last week York’s KM Unit co-hosted an Open House to demonstrate ORION’s (Ontario Research and Innovation Optical Network) new online professional networking and collaboration platform O3. “Introduced as a new value-added service for member institutions, O3 helps deliver on ORION’s mandate of supporting Ontario’s research and education community. O3 seeks to encourage collaboration, the sharing of ideas and research results, and connecting with colleagues across academic disciplines. It is a unique professional networking and collaboration platform developed by and for the research and education community (ORION newsletter, May 2009). “

Gary Hilson, ORION’s Projects and Alliances Consultant, was on hand to give attendees an overview of the platform and its various features, which include a number of Web 2.0 tools such as member profiles, user created blogs, wikis, discussion forums, as well as document management. ResearchImpact is currently exploring how we can use the O3 platform to facilitate and foster collaboration between KM brokers and researchers. David Phipps of ResearchImpact said, “Social networking is an important, emerging tool for knowledge mobilization.  As our work naturally connects people over distance and time, a robust social networking platform with features that allow us to connect and collaborate with partners will enhance the KM services that York can offer it’s graduate students, research and their partners.” Omar Mohammed, Manager of Research Computing at York, stated, “We are pleased that ResearchImpact has taken the initiative to explore O3 as a collaboration platform for research and knowledge mobilization. The O3 initiative leverages the ORION research network and we will follow the emergence of O3 with interest.” The Open House was attended by over 20 people including York faculty and staff members, students working in a number of York’s Organized Research Units, as well as representatives from the York Region community.

If you are interested in more information about O3, please contact Gary Hilson at gary.hilson@orion.on.ca.

Knowledge Mobilization at York Looks Forward

On June 5, the KM Unit at York spent a day off-site at the Toronto Centre for Social Innovation embarking on visioning exercises to help define the scope of programs that will be offered in the fall. This is important as the current project funding will be sunsetting and operations will need streamlining to support sustainability.

The efforts from the day resulted in the following, and we welcome your thoughts and comments. Just click on the comments button above this message and share your thoughts!

Vision Statement

National leaders in knowledge mobilization, connecting research and people for social innovation.

Mission Statement

The KM unit at York University is a service unit that:

Builds a culture of knowledge mobilization
Fosters collaboration
Supports co-production of knowledge/research
Connects policy and practice relevant research to decision makers
Develops and delivers tools for knowledge mobilization

Our Values

Our service unit is built on the following values:

Respect – knowledge has many forms and origins and flows in a two way direction
Wisdom – grounding practice in theory and using practice to inform theory
Honesty – knowledge brokers are impartial, client-focused and honest brokers
Engagement – research engages with and is responsive to the needs of the partners
Impact – real world solutions for real world problems

ResearchSnapshot enhances broader access to research at York

Our new ResearchSnapshot series of clear language summaries of completed research was featured today in YFile, York’s daily news bulletin. You can search the ResearchSnapshot collection on our web site by clicking here.  Here is an excerpt from the article:

How would a community organization or policy-maker access social science or humanities research expertise from York? From the United Way of York Region to the Children’s Aid Society, non-academic audiences can now access ResearchSnapshot, a searchable library of summaries of research projects, completed by York’s Knowledge Mobilization (KM) Unit and launched at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at Carleton University on May 24.

Funded by a Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) grant and led by David Phipps, director, Office of Research Services, the first phase of ResearchSnapshot provides a database of 42 summaries of projects. The summaries – with expertise ranging from organizational behaviour to homelessness and immigration – are searchable by researcher, subject or keyword. Each summary is written in simple language intended to highlight the research expertise at York and inform decisions about public policy or professional practice.

A look at one ResearchSnapshot, about research on the impact of management policies on the nutrition of homeless youth in Canada, informs organizations that research by York education Professor Stephen Gaetz found that the policies intended to help homeless youth are, in fact, having a negative effect. The research identifies that policies are forcing youth to rely on limited emergency food aid and instead of becoming independent they are increasing their chances of malnourishment. Similarly, all summaries identify the research methods, background, results and possible applications, as well as provide a brief biography of the researcher.

“York’s social science and humanities researchers are well-recognized by the international research community. ResearchSnapshot now allows us to systematically extend that reach. Since we had identified the need for policy- and decision-makers to have access to research results that were written in plain language, these summaries are crucial in filling the implementation gap by strengthening the movement for evidence-based policy,” said Stan Shapson, vice-president research & innovation.

To view the full YFile story, click here.

To search the ResearchSnapshot collection, click here.

York Community Data Sharing Symposium II

The KM Unit at York University is pleased to be co-hosting the second York Community Data Sharing Symposium being held on Thursday, June 4 from 10:00 am to 2:00 pm.

York Community Data Sharing Symposium II

The second in a series of sessions highlighting the power of data to strengthen the capacity of York Region’s human service agencies.

How an Electronic Commons Can Help Us Tackle Poverty in York Region

Thursday, June 4, 2009
10:00 a.m. to 2:00 p.m

Morning Session
How the emergence of the “electronic commons” will help agencies and organizations share data and information?
How can new ways of information-sharing change the way people talk to each other?
How to use the web to create more options for mobilizing action among and within communities?

Afternoon Session
How can we transfer our knowledge to interactive discussions about efforts to address poverty in York Region?
How can we use new information-sharing tools to change the ways we collectively tackle poverty in York Region?

Guest Speakers, Panellists and Interactive Group Discussion
At the end of the day, you will have a better understanding of new and upcoming web-based social networking technologies and how they can be used to share information and knowledge to better serve the needs of children, youth and families in York Region.

Personal Reflections on the ‘Hidden in Plain Sight: Living Homeless in York Region’ Photovoice Exhibit at YorkU – April 27 to May 1, 2009

The York Region Alliance to End Homelessness (YREAH) was formed in 1999 as concerns about homelessness were emerging in our communities. “The Alliance is a coalition of social service agencies, faith groups, interested community members and government representatives that meets regularly to understand, plan and coordinate services and supports related to homelessness in York Region”. What underlies this statement is an incredible, tireless commitment to support this work. I have had the pleasure of working with this agency as a knowledge broker at York University. The emergence of a KM unit at York in 2006 provided opportunity for this agency to seek opportunities to bolster its limited capacity to perform its work. In the summer of 2008, KM Intern Jennifer Logan (MA Candidate, Geography) worked for the Alliance to lead a Photovoice project that captured the images and voices of York Region’s homeless population. The primary goal of the project was to develop a resource to help raise the awareness of homelessness issues in York Region in helping advance policies and practices for homelessness in York Region.

I was able to visit the exhibit here at York on the afternoon of April 30 and I was the only visitor in the gallery at the time. The pictures tell stories that statistics simply cannot. Seeing those images took me back to my work in adult literacy where each person I worked with had a story to tell. The stories were not always pleasant (although some were) and unfortunately reflected a daily reality of struggle and perseverance. The images I saw brought many of the stories from my early career back to life, in a moving and extremely powerful way. I recall a quotation from Joseph Stalin that has stuck with me, “One death is a tragedy, one million is a statistic.” The exhibit I saw helped me to remember we are not dealing with numbers or statistics here, but with people. These people are part of our community.

I applaud Jennifer and YREAH for their work in giving voice to people who are not always given changes to tell their stories. The stories in that room have helped me to reflect on the importance of my work and I am grateful for that lesson!