Grant: CCI Mobilize Grants

The Loyalist College Centre for Healthy Communities (CFHC) will partner with community not-for-profits and government agencies to strengthen their impact on poverty, health and wellbeing, quality education, and inequities, in alignment with Loyalist College’s commitment to the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. The CFHC will imbue a health equity perspective in all projects and recognize the interrelated nature of health determinants, first drawing on interdisciplinary teams from the School of Health, Human and Justice Studies then expanding to other schools of the college. Research activities will include: assessing community partners’ existing programs for effectiveness (helping partners measure impact); identifying equity gaps in existing services (unfair, avoidable and remedial differences among clients) and best practices for increasing accessibility; identifying community organizations that would benefit from interdisciplinary perspectives in their response to interrelated needs (e.g. social determinants of health); designing and trialing new services/programs; increasing shared knowledge and coordinated responses among organizations; developing training, including an applied research micro-credential, to leverage lessons from applied research to inform community partners (employees and volunteers) and internal audiences (faculty and students); and studying successful services’ applicability to other regions in Canada. The CFHC will be a centre ‘without walls’. ‘Without walls’ means that there is no physical centre located at Loyalist College. Rather, the research workspace is largely at community partners’ facilities. Centres without walls are a recent concept, fast-tracked by the COVID-19 pandemic. A centre ‘without walls’ is extremely visible and accessible, removes partners’ geographic and time barriers by bringing researchers directly to them, promotes collaboration among complementary organizations, is nimble in launching new projects as needs arise, and utilizes community spaces that are known to be currently available, rather than building new infrastructure.