Experimental Design for Principles-Driven Community Engagement Funding Programs at the University of British Columbia

Abstract: A core challenge facing community partners who work with post-secondary institutions (PSI) is a lack of accessible resources to help offset costs they incur when they share time, resources and knowledge with faculty, students and staff. This lack of resources can also serve as a reminder that contributions by community partners are not fully recognized, acknowledged and respected in the academy and, in effect, undermine deep relationship-building efforts by the partners themselves.

In 2018, the Community Engagement Office at the University of British Columbia created two community-facing funding programs, the Community-University Engagement Support (CUES) Fund and Partnership Recognition and Exploration (PRE) Fund, to offer financial supports directly to community organizations. These funds are an effort by the university to share its resources with communities that work with faculty, staff, and students on engaged teaching learning, and research projects and to acknowledge the important work they do and the costs they take on in doing so.

Over the last 5 years, CUES and PRE have delivered $2.24 million to over 400 community-based organizations working in reciprocal partnerships with faculty, staff, and students on community-driven collaborations that advance the needs of community partners and recognize their roles as equal collaborators, decision-makers and resource holders. We are happy to share stories from these important community-engaged projects and offer our programs as models for PSIs to become equitable community funders. We hope the session can start a conversation about approaches and models for community funding that may be resources across the PSI sector.

Narrative: A core challenge facing community members and organizations who work in partnership with post-secondary institutions (PSI) is a lack of accessible resources that help to offset largely invisible costs community partners incur when they share time, resources and knowledge with faculty, students and staff. This lack of resources may also serve as a reminder that contributions by community partners may not be fully recognized, acknowledged and respected in the academy which, in effect, can undermine the deep relationship-building efforts by the partners themselves.

In 2018, the Community Engagement Office at the University of British Columbia (UBC) created two community-facing funding programs, the Community-University Engagement Support (CUES) Fund and Partnership Recognition and Exploration (PRE) Fund, to offer financial supports directly to community organizations. These funds are part of the university's effort to more equitably share resources with diverse communities and organizations who work with faculty, staff, and students on engaged teaching learning, and research projects and to acknowledge the important work they do and the costs they take on in doing so.

PRE Fund is a smaller funding program that offers up to $1,500 for community-university projects, while CUES Fund provides up to $25,000. Funding applications for each program asks community and university partners to work together on their proposals and seeks details on how the partnership works and why. It is an opportunity for partners to connect and speak less about what they are working on and what the goals of that work are, and to think more about why they are working together and what they each bring to the table. This opportunity to clarify purpose and roles in the relationship launches a discussion about how the partnership supports ethical and reciprocal engagement, which then underpins the details about the specific project the partners will work on together.

Over the last 5 years, we have delivered $2.24 million to over 400 community-based organizations who are working in reciprocal partnerships with UBC faculty, students and staff on community-driven collaborations that advance the needs of community partners. We’ve been astounded by the demand from all disciplinary corners of the university, with recipients representing all 19 faculties across 2 campuses.

As an innovative solution to the challenges facing community-engaged research, teaching and learning, representatives from the UBC Community Engagement Office would be pleased to offer a Lightning Talk to share stories from these 400+ important community-engaged projects to show the impact and value their equitable collaborations are having, in the community and university, and to offer these programs as models for PSIs to become equitable community funders.

CUES and PRE Fund projects advance the needs of community partners and communities and are incredibly varied, from peer advocacy in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside to Indigenous art and language collaborations, combatting racial discrimination and mitigating the impacts of climate change. Communities are also diverse, with proposals from groups, organizations and communities serving youth and Elders, the LGBTQ2S+ community, urban, rural and remote populations, racialized groups, and more. A significant proportion of our funds go to Indigenous communities and organizations on projects related to reconciliation, decolonization, land-based learning, language revitalization, and more.

The funding programs are also an opportunity to look deeper into the challenges and barriers faced by community partners, university partners and university administrators to fully engage in and support community-based projects and programs. In addition to the stories from the projects themselves, our team is also excited to share how we have used these programs as an opportunity to experiment with funding program design and delivery. Our growing reliance on trust-based philanthropy in all aspects of the design of both PRE and CUES has led to radical changes to how applicants access funds, how funds are distributed to partners, and what is expected of community and university partners in co-developing their applications, building strength in their partnerships, and sharing their stories of reciprocal and ethical partnership.

We are excited by the opportunity to share stories from these important community-engaged projects and to offer a model for PSIs as equitable community funders. We believe the structure of a Lightning Talk will also be a critical opportunity to hear from other institutions who are managing the same challenges and can share insights from their own experiences and experimental designs.