We can’t have community without relationships—these are the connections that build community. Any successful partnership must be built on trusting and respectful relationships guided by integrity. We realize that relationships take time to develop and thus we commit to providing opportunities to connect people across communities, sectors, and disciplines to foster a genuine and interconnected network of colleagues to work together for an inclusive, sustainable Greater Hamilton Area.

Our role is to

• Create opportunities for campus and community partners to connect.
• Create opportunities for relationships to be built across campus.
• Attend community, faculty, and major unit events or meetings.
• Monitor issues and opportunities.
• Identify priorities to support.
• Connect with regional, global, & national community-engaged networks.

Our team develops our relationships and connections to identify opportunities for McMaster University to respond to community priorities through research, education, or service. Relatedly, we respond to requests from faculty, staff and students interested in community connections for learning, research and volunteerism. We listen to ideas that are brought to us and actively connect people together who have shared interests with the goal of building new community-campus partnerships.

Our role is to

• Make introductions or broker partnerships around shared interests or aligned timelines.
• Identify how resources, partnerships, or programs can address community- and university-identified priorities.
• Identify and agree upon Faculty community engagement needs and partnerships.

Our team is comprised of expert community-engagers, educators, and researchers working to share their knowledge, resources, and expertise to improve community-engaged practices and processes.

Our role is to

• Create and deliver community engagement resources such as workshops, webinars, guides, handbooks, literature, slide shows for faculty, staff, and students.
• Raise awareness of OCE as a resource to facilitate relationships.
• Identify activities, processes, and tools used in other institutions and communities.
• Support and facilitate faculty, staff, and community partners in using tools and resources in their programs, projects or initiatives.

Together, we work to develop and support community-engaged programs that orient McMaster resources towards partnerships that embed McMaster’s principles of community engagement.

Our role is to

• Provide direct support to priority community engagement programs or initiatives, new or existing, within major units and within each faculty at McMaster.
• Develop and sustain programs within the OCE that build individual and program-level capacity for community-campus partnerships.

Our team is also working to establish sustainable University-wide infrastructure: funding, staff, policies, protocols— to support community engagement activities.

Our role is to

• Develop the OCE as a core community engagement resource at McMaster.
• Develop the Network for Community-Campus Partnerships as a coordinated decentralized approach to formalizing community engagement processes at the University.
• Recognize and celebrate community engagement accomplishments and milestones.
• Reduce identified barriers.

A variety of approaches are needed to support community partners as well as McMaster students, faculty, and staff who are interested in developing skills and competencies for principled, sustainable, and reciprocal partnerships. It is also crucial to develop sufficient structures and policies for recognition which will ensure that we are supporting, acknowledging, and encouraging those who pursue community-engaged education or research partnerships.

A major barrier to any partnership development is that people (both partners and colleagues at McMaster) do not know where to go, who to talk to, or what resources exist to support partnership building. There is a need to improve access to (and awareness about) both physical spaces (on and off campus) and virtual spaces that can help partners use these pathways to navigate community-campus partnerships.

This pillar will focus on improving awareness of the work of community-engaged individuals, research and education outcomes, available resources, and upcoming opportunities and events. Communicating in plain language, being clear about steps that partners can take to engage, developing visual pathways for engagement, maintaining the community engagement database, and raising the profile of community liaisons across the University can improve partnership opportunities and outcomes.

Organized in partnership with community and campus partners, face-to-face meetings on specific themes or topics will support relationship building and ongoing relationships that can lead to potential partnership opportunities. Tying funding opportunities to specific topics can encourage ideas to move towards projects, while sharing outcomes of conversations or the conversations themselves (e.g. in an online repository) can encourage others to connect to ideas while also informing actions going forward.

• Embedded the principles into undergraduate curriculum within the Community Engagement Minor including our Foundations Course CMTYENGA 2A03, McMaster Child and Youth University program courses CMTYEMGA 2MC3 and 2MD3 and our Semester in Residence courses CMTYENGA 4A06/4A09.
• Facilitated over 125 presentations to McMaster staff, students and faculty on the principles of community engagement.
• Established 2 awards: the President’s Awards for Community-Engaged Research (Scholarship) and MSU Community Engagement Teaching Award. To qualify for the awards, nominees were required to articulate how their work reflected the principles of community engagement.
• Recognized 3 campus and community partnerships through the President’s Awards for Community Engaged
  Research with each partnership receiving $10,000 to foster their continued research projects.
• Responded to a request to join the Carnegie Foundation Canadian Pilot Classification Cohort designed to review and embed principled community engagement into the policies and practices of the University.

• Established the OCE as a central bridge between the University and greater Hamilton community.
• Successfully advocated for decreased parking fees for community partners entering campus and worked with Continuing Education to provide meeting space for McMaster affiliated community groups.
• Facilitated Change Camp Hamilton three years in a row, creating hundreds of community-engaged experiential learning opportunities and developing stronger partnerships and relationships with the City of Hamilton, the Social Planning & Research Council of Hamilton, the Hamilton Community Foundation, Mohawk College, Redeemer University College. The series engaged over 500 attendees and directly contributed 234 action recommendations to the City of Hamilton’s Our Future Hamilton 25-year vision.
• Facilitated 4 annual Community-Campus Idea Exchanges to bring over 600 community and campus partners together on and off campus to discuss collaborative strategies to address shared challenges.
• Developed a co-director leadership model that allows for the development of relationships both within the University (academic director) and within the Hamilton community (community director).

• Established the McMaster Research Shop as an OCE program to provide rapid research to community requests. A total of 44 projects have been completed since the program was transferred to the OCE in 2016.
• Created a Community-Campus CoLaboratory focused on new partnerships related to digital literacy, mobility, and social entrepreneurship that resulted in $15,000 in project grants and contributed directly to new programs with the Hamilton Public
  Library, City of Hamilton, and YWCA Hamilton.
  • A collective of 12 local women are now selling their products out of a retrofitted shipping container in Barton Village.
  • Two Digital Literacy Summits were hosted at the Hamilton Public Library and engaged over 60 community and campus stakeholders.
  • A by-law was passed for King William to temporarily close to vehicles to support local businesses by offering diners a safe “dine-in” experience.
• Created the McMaster Access Strategy as a direct result of requests from community partners. The program is being developed to assist academically qualified students from marginalized and underrepresented groups in Hamilton and surrounding communities to access university education at the undergraduate level.
• Offered 26 Community-Campus Catalyst Grants valued at a total of $30,000 to partnerships between Faculties/ Major Units, students and community partners.
• Provided over $10,000 in financial sponsorship to over 12 community and campus events such as the LGBTQ+ Solidarity Night, Model City Hall, State of the Neighbourhoods and 100in1 Day Hamilton.
• Co-developed the CityLAB Hamilton program in collaboration with the City of Hamilton, Mohawk College, and Redeemer University College. The program has involved over 39,000 student hours on city projects to-date.
• Established close relationships with community partners involved in social justice work and connected McMaster
  faculty, students and staff to respond to identified needs.

• Developed a cyclical model of feedback through the annual Idea Exchange to understand both opportunities and barriers to community engagement.
• Presented the outcomes of McMaster community engagement program growth and development at multiple national and international conferences.
• Participated in the Impact and Strategic Clarity module offered by Innoweave through the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation to clarify our intended impact and to develop a new 5-year strategic plan for 2020-2025.