A New Way Forward—Igniting Inspiration through a New Strategic Plan
In June 2016, McMaster’s Community Engagement Strategy was launched to set the direction for the next 5 years of community engagement at McMaster. The vision of this strategy is working together for an inclusive, sustainable greater Hamilton. McMaster’s Office of Community Engagement was formed to support the pursuit of McMaster’s Community Engagement Strategy.
Action-oriented principles of community engagement were co-developed between community and campus partners to provide a framework for how to work together. The principles include: relationships, reciprocity, equity, continuity, openness to learning, and commitment to act.
The primary goal of McMaster’s Community Engagement Strategy is to establish these principles as the foundation of community-campus partnerships.
To build on the foundation of the existing strategic plan, our office participated in the Impact and Strategic Clarity module offered by Innoweave through the J.W. McConnell Family Foundation from September 2019 to April 2020. Our objectives in completing the module were to i) clarify our mission (i.e., what we are trying to achieve and what we will hold ourselves accountable to); and ii) develop a new 5-year strategic plan that would articulate how we will achieve this mission and the results we are striving to have both locally and globally.
By 2025, McMaster University will have 500 community-engaged partnerships that are addressing community— and university— identified priorities, built on respectful relationships, mutually beneficial, equity-seeking, and adequately resourced.
Our new strategic plan outlines five key strategies to build community-engaged partnerships and achieve our intended impacts. Many objectives of our first strategic plan are ongoing and connect with this next phase of community engagement at McMaster.
Working together for an inclusive, sustainable Greater Hamilton
McMaster is a proactive, responsive, and collaborative partner in our community. We connect people, ideas, and communities.
Every person can access, contribute to, and potentially benefit from our work together, irrespective of discipline, gender, ethnicity, age, or ability.
Healthy social, environmental, and economic systems support thriving communities. Recognizing and valuing both the interconnectedness and limits of these systems, short-term actions and long-term planning decisions are made with the health and prosperity of both present and future generations in mind.
We are embedded in and connected to multiple communities in and around the city of Hamilton. We also recognize that we are connected to and working with many communities outside of Hamilton’s geographical and political boundaries.
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 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 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.
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 team is also working to establish sustainable University-wide infrastructure: funding, staff, policies, protocols— to support community engagement activities.
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.
Learn more about our principles of community engagement in our online sourcebook
Read Sourcebook
During the Network for Community-Campus Partnership’s strategic planning process over 2015-2016, community and campus partners strongly recommended that a co-developed set of action-oriented principles serve as the foundation of our work together. Informed by our consultations, the principles below will guide our work in initiating, sustaining, monitoring, and evaluating community-campus partnerships. These principles are meant to be broadly applicable for any partnership, from local to global, and can be applied across all Faculties, disciplines, and sectors.
From design, to participation, to the outcomes of a project, we strive to work together for mutual benefit.
We are conscious of the historical and structural inequities that exist in society and strive to provide access and opportunities to all residents and members of our communities.
Acknowledging that different communities work on different timelines and schedules, we strive to consider both the short and long-term implications of our work together.
Change takes time. We are committed to continually learn from and evaluate our work together, reflecting on and sharing both our successes and failures to grow as individuals, partnerships, and communities.
We aspire to make a positive difference in our community by sharing and acting on our knowledge to contribute to the greater social good.
As we reach the end of our first strategic plan, we reflected on our accomplishments to date and where we have had significant impact. In particular, we developed a solid foundation of practices and infrastructure for community-engaged work at the University and within the Hamilton community. Most objectives that guide our work are ongoing—they require us to continually strive towards embedding community engagement in the processes and policies at the University, building relationships with community partners, and removing barriers to working together. All with an eye on impact, we have highlighted some outcomes that we have achieved in the last 4 years as they relate to the goals in our first strategic plan.