Community Partnerships

Megaphone

Megaphone changes the story on poverty by promoting social equity, amplifying marginalized voices, and creating meaningful work. They produce a high-quality monthly magazine and annual calendar that low-income vendors sell on the streets of Vancouver and Victoria to earn income and build community.

SFU VOCE and Megaphone collaborate on Community Journalism 101, an ongoing project that offers a five-week, free, low-barrier course.

Karen Jamieson Dance

SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement is partnered with Karen Jamieson Dance Company to offer community dance workshops at different times during the year. Often these workshops have lead to performances at the annual Heart of the City Festival. The work includes live music, poetry, First Nations drumming, and cultural dances. Karen Jamieson has run workshops out of the Carnegie Community Centre since the late 1990s and has many strong community connections. Karen Jamieson Dance also mentors dancers in socially-engaged arts practice.

Binners’ Project

Binners’ Project fosters social and economic inclusion, builds community resilience and stronger networks, and engages on sustainability issues. Through their programs, they empower binners as part of the circular economy — building a community from the bottom up. SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement has often collaborated with Binners’ Project to support their events and initiatives, and to engage the public in conversations about the issues that underpin their work.

Hives for Humanity

Hives for Humanity is a non-profit organization that encourages community connections through apiculture, more commonly known as beekeeping. Through mentorship based programming they create flexible opportunities for people to engage in the therapeutic culture that surrounds the hive; they foster connectivity to nature and to each other; they participate in local sustainable economies; they support at-risk populations of people and pollinators, and they do so with respect and joy.

SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement partnered with Hives for Humanity to support Research 101, a series of conversations around community-based research ethics.

Heart of the City Festival

The Heart of the City Festival is an annual festival that celebrates the unique Downtown Eastside community. The festival is produced in partnership with Vancouver Moving Theatre, the Carnegie Community Centre, Association of United Ukrainian Canadians, and a number of arts and non-arts partners. SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement hosts a number of events at SFU during the festival.

Project Limelight

SFU is partnered with Project Limelight — a free theatre and performing arts program for 8–12 year olds in East Vancouver. This four month program, supported by Ouest Solutions, offers youth in the Strathcona neighbourhood to learn from professional artists and teachers in a safe, welcoming environment. They performed their first play at the Fei and Milton Wong Theater in June, 2012 with two sold out performances — an adaptation of Alice in Wonderland. There are 25 kids involved per cohort.

Reel Causes

Reel Causes partners with filmmakers and Canadian causes dedicated to addressing global social justice issues. They host film screenings followed by a Q&A session to educate and inspire our community, and provide a forum for authentic conversation around the issues that affect us locally. These screenings foster an environment for audience members to discuss causes freely with artists and organizations, with the goal of inspiring individuals to make a positive difference — in their own unique way.

Lacan Salon

The purpose of the Lacan Salon is to share, discuss, and promote the transmission of psychoanalytic discourse by reading and engaging with the works of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud. They discuss a wide range of topics such as subjectivity, the analytical act, and cultural phenomena. The Lacan Salon has partnered with SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement since September 2012 to hold their seminars at SFU.

Writers’ Exchange

The Writers' Exchange gets inner-city kids excited about reading and writing. Each year, 550 kids participate in fun, free programs where they complete creative literacy projects and receive individualized attention from volunteer mentors so that each child can succeed to the best of his or her ability. Most programs end in the kids' work being published in professionally designed and edited publications, and a giant launch party!

Heritage Vancouver

Shaping Vancouver is a conversation series on urban issues produced by Heritage Vancouver in partnership with SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement. The series has been running since 2015, covering topics such as the City of Vancouver Heritage Action Plan, “Our Neighbourhoods,” “Reshaping Conversations on Heritage,” and “Contested Places.”

New(to)Town Collective

New(to)Town Collective is an emerging theatre collective based in Vancouver BC, aspiring to provide accessible, experimental training workshops and creating new interdisciplinary works together. 

They collaborate and cross pollinate their practices and ideas with collaborators from across all artistic disciplines through their Training Jams. They bring together a unique blend of practices including: Grotowski, devising, clowning, visual arts, contemporary dance, playwriting, dramaturgy, directing and more! They integrate these practices to train and create new works as a collective while supporting each others' individual artistic endeavors.

312 Main

As of August 2018, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement moved into the 2nd floor of 312 Main Street, as part of the first phase of this exciting new centre. Vancity Community Foundation has partnered with the City of Vancouver on an initial 15-year lease to animate this building as a site for social and economic innovation, partially modelled on the Centre for Social Innovation, based in Toronto. Funding and support has also come in from Heritage Canada, the Province of BC and additional support from the City of Vancouver and Vancity Credit Union. Over 80 community organizations will be moving in to the newly renovated Vancouver police station that dates back to 1953. SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement will be moving some of its community-based programming to the 312 Main Street space and further developing its existing partnerships, focusing on community partnerships, knowledge democracy and community-based research.

SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement is proud to support the launch and implementation of SFU's Community-Engaged Research initiative (CERi), stationed out of 312 Main.

Women Transforming Cities

Women Transforming Cities (WTC) is a grassroots organization based in Vancouver, Canada. For 10 years, WTC has been working as part of the intersectional feminist movement to ensure that all self-identifying women and girls can live safe and fulfilling lives, and participate in civic life.

SFU’s Community-Engaged Research Initiative

Designed around a collaborative research infrastructure, SFU’s Community-Engaged Research Initiative (CERi) promotes principles of participation, cooperation, social transformation and knowledge translation to lift up and strengthen the capacity of SFU’s researchers and students, to engage respectfully and ethically with community members. CERi's goals are to become Canada's hub for community-engaged research; to facilitate wider public engagement with research; and to deepen connections between researchers and communities. CERi focuses on a reciprocal relationship between universities and communities.

SFU Public Square

SFU Public Square, a signature initiative designed to spark, nurture and restore community connections, establishes Simon Fraser University as the go-to convener of serious and productive conversations about issues of public concern.

More than a single place or program, SFU Public Square assembles the hearts, minds, and talents of diverse communities to promote inclusive, intelligent, and inspiring dialogue. SFU Public Square events and offerings proclaim SFU’s vision to be Canada’s leading community-engaged research university.

SFU School for the Contemporary Arts

Over its thirty year history, the SCA has produced outstanding alumni who have gone on to play a major role in redefining the arts in Canada. The interdisciplinary MFA program is widely recognized internationally as a unique opportunity where graduate students can explore connections between art forms and develop their own creative voice.

SFU Institute for the Humanities

The Institute for the Humanities at SFU seeks to accomplish these basic objectives: stimulate student interest and faculty research in demonstrating the irreducibility of humanistic perspectives in understanding some of the most pressing social, economic, political and environmental problems we face and, above all, to engage the many publics beyond the academy in city, the province, the country and, indeed, the wider world. The Institute is perfectly placed, therefore, to play a key role in the idea of SFU as “student-centred, research-driven and community-engaged.”

SFU Office for Aboriginal Peoples

Since 2012, SFU’s Vancity Office of Community Engagement has collaborated with SFU’s Office for Aboriginal Peoples to produce an ongoing singing and drumming workshop series led by composer, producer and traditional Lil’wat singer Russell Wallace. Wallace teaches social songs which, unlike ceremonial songs, are meant to be shared and can be sung by the community. By sharing these songs, Wallace hopes that workshop participants will gain a greater appreciation of the diversity of Aboriginal music. These workshops are an opportunity to gain greater awareness and knowledge of First Nations history and culture while meeting new people and sharing through music. The free workshops are offered on a monthly basis between September–April, with no pre-registration or prior singing or drumming experience required.

Since Spring 2014, the offices have collaborated in presenting an annual Lecture Series on Aboriginal Issues.

SFU Centre for Dialogue

Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Dialogue uses dialogue to generate non-partisan and constructive communication around difficult topics. They partner with government, business, and community groups to explore critical issues that impact the social, economic, environmental, and cultural well-being of our communities. Programming at the Centre occupies an unusual intersection, seamlessly connecting student learning, university research and community engagement.

SFU Urban Studies

SFU Urban Studies is located in the heart of downtown Vancouver and uses the neighbourhood, city and region as living laboratories. Their interdisciplinary faculty includes geographers, public policy scholars, political scientists, historians, economists and anthropologists whose teaching and research interests lie both within and outside Metro Vancouver, and who straddle both theory and practice.

SFU Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies

The SFU Centre for Comparative Muslim Studies (CCMS) fosters academic and public discussion and understanding of Muslim societies and cultures. It shifts the analysis from the notion of a single religious landscape defined by the religion of Islam to that of Muslims of different experiences and interpretations as agents in the construction of their societies and cultures within specific contexts.

SFU School of Communication

Part of the Faculty of Communication, Art and Technology at Simon Fraser University, the School of Communication offers a dynamic, interdisciplinary examination of the ways in which media messages, institutions, and technologies operate within a wide range of social and cultural contexts.

UBC Learning Exchange

UBC Learning Exchange is a non-traditional academic space in the community, based in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver since 1999. They bring people together who might otherwise not connect. They’re a hub where ideas can be exchanged. Their work is grounded in the value of a learning exchange — the idea that learning is a ‘two-way street’. They welcome and empower people from the Downtown Eastside and the University of British Columbia to build capacity — and create a better future.

SFU Library

SFU’s libraries are vibrant educational hubs that support learning, research and community engagement. The SFU Library is also home to key initiatives such as the Public Knowledge Project and Digital Humanities Innovation Lab. SFU's Vancity Office of Community Engagement submits archived talks and podcasts to the library to be held in Summit, the university's research repository.