Research Shop

The Community Resource Centre of North and Centre Wellington (CRC) collaborated with CESI’s Research Shop to complete a community mapping exercise with students from Central Wellington District High School in Fergus, Ontario. The goal of this exercise was to explore youth’s vision and understand their perspectives regarding their local communities. Students were asked to identify existing local spaces and resources they use and to discuss what would make their communities an ideal place to live.

The year 2019 marked the 10th anniversary of the Research Shop, one of the five programs through which the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) fulfills its mandate to support and carry out community engaged scholarship. At the Research Shop, staff and graduate students work with local and regional organizations to design and carry out projects that address community research priorities.

The goal of this project was to highlight significant achievements in women’s rights in Canada over the past 100 years. Researchers created a series of posters to be displayed at the 2020 International Women’s Day Event being held in Guelph by the Canadian Federation of University Women, Zonta, and Guelph-Wellington Women in Crisis.

As the organization approached its 15th year in operation, the board of the Guelph Enabling Garden (GEG) collaborated with CESI’s Research Shop to complete an evaluation of the garden and the GEG horticultural therapy programming. The evaluation engaged program participants, volunteers, and other garden users as a means to assess how well the needs and priorities of these groups were being met by the current horticultural therapy programs, events and structure of the physical space.

This research was conducted by CESI’s Research Shop in collaboration with the Theatre of the Beat (TOTB), a not-for-profit theatre company. The purpose of this project was to evaluate the TOTB Restorative Justice Theatre Program, which works with incarcerated persons at the Grand Valley Institution for Women. From May 2018 to April 2019, a variety of tools were used to assess the perceptions of the program amongst facilitators, inmates participating in the program, audience members for the theatre performances, and prison staff.

This report was prepared for the Community Resource Centre of North and Centre Wellington. It shares the findings from an evaluation of the Rural Emphasis Campaign, which aimed to create a dialogue around the issue of and solutions for rural youth homelessness in Wellington County. Specifically, it reports on data collected through surveys which examined the extent of awareness for youth vulnerability in the community, the effectiveness and impact of the campaign, and ways to improve the campaign’s presence within the community.

The impacts and experiences of community engaged research and community-university partnerships can be challenging to share via traditional research and knowledge dissemination methods.

The Research Shop is one of five programs through which the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute (CESI) fulfills its mandate to bring together community and campus skills and resources to directly support and carry out community-engaged scholarship and develop others' capacities tto do so. At the Research Shop, staff and graduate students work with local and regional organizations to design and carry out projects that address community research priorities.

A literature review was conducted in collaboration with the Guelph Neighbourhood Support Coalition, the Guelph & Wellington Task Force for Poverty Elimination, and HIV/AIDS Resources and Community Health-Guelph. Its primary goal was to identify best practices for engaging and compensating people with lived experience who provide work for community organizations.

The evaluation of the Targeted Walk-In Service program (TWIS) was conducted in collaboration with Canadian Mental Health Association Waterloo Wellington (CMHA-WW). This evaluation is made up of two components; a key informant interview study and a literature review. The key informant interviews were conducted with TWIS service providers to explore their insights regarding service delivery of the program and the implementation of client satisfaction surveys.