In 2012, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) announced the successful funding of the Community-First: Impacts of Community Engagement (CFICE) Partnership Grant, valued at $2.5 M distributed over seven years (2012-2019). Co-managed by Carleton University and the Canadian Alliance for Community Service-Learning (CACSL), the project represents a collaboration of over twenty post-secondary institutions (PSIs) and sixty community partners. The project’s main research question is: “How can community campus partnerships be designed and implemented to maximize the value created for non-profit, community-based organizations” (CFICE, 2016)? After four years of sector-specific work that supported demonstration projects across five key hubs, CFICE has entered its second phase of cross-sectoral work, which focuses on “changing the partnership policies and practices of non-profits, post-secondary institutions, and funders to create more effective and valuable community-campus partnerships” (CFICE, 2016, emphasis in original).
It is from this work that the purpose for this literature review arises. This literature review surveys the existing academic literature to identify current research related to policies and assessments of community-campus engagement (CCE) that are conducive to supporting culture change within PSIs to support the work of CCE to produce positive social impacts.
These findings provide a foundation upon which the Community-Campus Engage Canada (CCEC) working group can approach the question how might ‘Community First’ approaches to community-campus engagement (CCE) be more effectively embedded within post-secondary institutions?
Please note: This literature review was created under CCEC when it was known as the Aligning Institutions for Community Impact (AICI) working group. There are therefore several references to AICI throughout the document.
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