Grant: Meetings, Planning and Dissemination Grant: Knowledge Translation

For the last 4 years York University in partnership with the United Way of York Region (UWYR) have been exploring how collaborations between university based researchers, graduate students and community organizations can create benefits for health and society. Working under a Meetings, Planning and Dissemination - KT Events Grant from the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, York University and UWYR will lead a 1½ day meeting with their counterparts from St. John's, Montreal, Saskatoon and Victoria to disseminate the lessons learned from this 4 year collaboration, explore how United Ways and their local universities can implement local KT operations and network nationally to enhance knowledge translation and research collaboration. The KT Event will be April 5-6, 2010 and be held in the York University Research Tower which is fully video and broadband enabled. The KT Event will be video broadcast and video captured allowing broader participation and viewing of the proceedings once the video has been edited into chapters and posted on York's KT website, www.researchimpact.ca. We anticipate the following short term outcomes from the KT event: 1) a shared understanding of the benefits of institutional KT services for students, researchers and community partners; 2) evidence and best practices provided to inform decisions about establishing local KT support services for each university and community; 3) the outline of a strategic plan for ResearchImpact, Canada's national KT network; 4) the outline of a social media strategy to support KT.