Community Scholars Program Spotlight: CityHive

This Q+A is taken from an interview conducted by Tara Mahoney (SFU CERi) on the collaboration between CityHive and the Community Scholars Program. The interviewees included Heather De Forest and Dana McFarland from the Community Scholars Program and Joanne Nellas and Giulia Belotti from CityHive. The interview has been edited for brevity.

In partnership with Vancouver Island University, the University of Northern British Columbia, the University of British Columbia, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, and the University of the Fraser Valley, the Simon Fraser University Library coordinates the Community Scholars Program to help organizations meet their research needs through SFU library online collections. The program also provides research consultations, workshops and grants to support the research needs of participating organizations. CityHive is on a mission to transform the way that young people are engaged in shaping their cities and communities. Despite being on the frontlines of environmental, social, and economic crises, young people are too rarely involved in local planning and decision-making. Through youth-led and youth-run programs including civic education programs, innovation labs, and consulting work, CityHive is working towards a more youth-engaged future. 

The collaboration between CityHive and the Community Scholars Program resulted in Enhancing Youth Leadership and Agency: A Toolkit for Successful Leadership Programs, a shareable document that details the best practices for youth engagement programs. The document can be viewed here.

How did this project come about? 

Giulia Belotti, CityHive: We wanted to create something that people could use and that would be accessible to community members […] The idea of developing a toolkit emerged once we started finding interesting insights in the literature. For instance, one of the main findings was that non-profit organizations do not share useful evaluation documents between themselves. It's just not common practice and it should be. We thought the best way to communicate these findings is through a toolkit that can be more interactive and more accessible not only to CityHive as an internal document but to everyone. 

Joanne Nellas, CityHive: CityHive has been running programs since 2017 and our organizational capacity and our youth reach and impact has expanded so much since then. There is so much knowledge within the nonprofit sector about how to best serve communities. We thought it would be great to learn from other organization's best practices and discover how we could enhance the way we design and deliver our programs. 

What were the goals for this collaboration? 

Dana McFarland, Vancouver Island University Library, Community Scholars Program: The Information Research Grant was designed to support staff (of non-profit and charity-based organizations) to hire a researcher or by backfilling an existing staff member who would be able to do this kind of research work. 

Joanne Nellas, CityHive: Our goals were to use research to understand how to improve our programs and better engage with youth – like, how can we build our capacity to more meaningfully engage with youth and what could we do to meet them where they're at? 

Heather De Forest, SFU Library: In setting the parameters for the grantmaking, we didn't want to specify what the outputs would need to be. We wanted those to be authentic to the organization's needs and to the goals of the organization. 

Why are community-university collaborations like this one important? 

Heather De Forest, SFU Library: We want to show what can be achieved by community researchers when they have access to scholarly publications. I want collaborations like this to inspire academics to think about their own publishing practices, where they are publishing their research and how accessible that is to scholars who are not academic affiliates. 

Joanne Nellas, CityHive: One thing that I appreciated about the Community Scholars Program is that it allowed CityHive to lead and direct the project and to create whatever would be most meaningful to us. I think that type of trust and flexibility was super valuable. Youth-serving organizations have a great understanding of the needs and nuances of the community they engage with but don’t often have the capacity to develop research on their own nor the capability to access published research to supplement their work. . 

Giulia Belotti, CityHive: I hope researchers understand the importance of engaging with community groups, especially youth, to enable broader societal and transformational change. I hope that this toolkit is just a starting point for more engagement with community researchers. I hope that researchers and community organizations will engage with the content and test what we are saying with their programs to advance this knowledge and mobilize it even further. 

What are the next steps for the Community Scholar’s Program and CityHive? 

Joanne Nellas, CityHive: What is next for us is putting our findings into action.. It highlighted where our strengths lie but also areas that we need to improve. Evaluation was one and we’ve used this document to help inform our current programs’ evaluation process. We hope this document can serve as a helpful resource for other organizations too. 

Heather DeForest, SFU Library: We want to see if we can find funding or partnerships that will allow us to offer this grant program again. We also want to explore how the Community Scholars Program can support community organizations in sharing their reports and resources more widely. We need to think about the other needs of community researchers in the full cycle of research -- what else is needed and how do we support that? 

Dana McFarland, Vancouver Island University: It's been so rewarding to work with CityHive on this project that is going to continue to evolve and bear fruit for the organization and be shared with others. We have the potential to take what we have learned through this experience and offer other opportunities to community scholars that build on this one. Whether it's future offerings of this grant or some other kind of program or service that evolves out of this. 

Check out Enhancing Youth Leadership and Agency: A Toolkit for Successful Leadership Programs, a shareable document that details the best practices for youth engagement programs.