Early on in the PhD program, I attended a session for graduate students about various Mitacs Fellowship programs that could support students to work with community organizations or businesses on applied research or other projects that could be useful both for the students to gain experience in research and to benefit potential partners. 

 

I was describing what I learned to a friend who was the Executive Director of the Co-operative Enterprise Council of New Brunswick (CECNB), Wendy Keats.  She immediately said she would love to participate in such a program and had a new Youth Partnership Initiative (YPI) that she would like help with in documenting the progress of the initiative and capturing its impact.  The goal of the initiative was to encourage youth to do community service and to teach them about the co-op model.  

 

I developed a Mitacs PhD Fellowship proposal for about 8 months (2 internship units of about 4 months).  The proposal was approved so in addition to still doing classes in the Fall of 2020, I also started working with CECNB part-time.  In hindsight, this was not a good time to start working on such a project.  I struggled to balance the work with CECNB and my coursework.  

 

In the end, I only did one internship unit (about 4 months).  For me, this was a good thing.  I learned a lot about working with a community partner, about how to develop an evaluation framework, how much organization needs to go into collecting data to ensure the results of any analysis is credible and useful, how to prepare reports for funders and how to evaluate the effectiveness of various programs.  

 

These learnings were critical for the second time I developed a Mitacs proposal in partnership with another community organization I had a relationship with, iMOVe.  In partnership with the Executive Director at iMOVe, Sobaz Benjamin, I developed another Mitacs PhD Fellowship proposal to do research for 6 Internship Units this time (about 3 years).  The goal of the project was to capture iMOVe’s approach to working with the complex group of marginalized and racialized people (who are incarcerated or formerly incarcerated), their families and their communities to enable iMOVe to teach other organizations and stakeholders about its approach, and to survey various academic and other literature to see how it might support iMOVe’s approach theoretically, and potentially help improve iMOVe's programming.

 

This time I feel much more prepared to participate in this work and learning opportunity in community.  While I have only completed a couple internship units related to this Mitacs proposal, I feel like I have much more time to think carefully about what kind of research might be most useful for iMOVe and how this work will also help inform my own research work.  I’m also further along in the PhD program with my courses finished, and able to focus more on this work.

 

The opportunity to continue to practice community-based research and to work with a black-led organization has also been very valuable.  For the first unit, based on some feedback from the reviewers of the proposal, I’ve been looking to focus what I might do more and so spending a lot of time observing Sobaz at work, and in dialogue with him and others involved in the work of iMOVe.  My intention is to use narrative inquiry as an approach and to create a podcast series, a film and maybe a short book, as well as explore potential curriculum approaches that could help others learn more about iMOVe’s approach.  At the heart of the story will be Sobaz’s personal experiences that led his to this work, why he is so passionate about it, what is unique about his approach and what the impact of the work (especially in the last 3 years with some core funding from Nova Scotia Department of Justice) has been on the current almost 40 program participants.  

 

We are also in the process of designing an event or events (in partnership with the Dalhousie Black Law Students Association and the Halifax Public Library) called ‘What is Justice?’  The goal is to introduce more people’s to the work that iMOVe is doing, to try applying some of Dr. Kumar’s ideas related to meditative inquiry to teaching others about iMOVe's work, to reflect on the nature of Justice, our current systems of such, and what we should be doing more of to help support the development of system that are really ‘just.’

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This is another opportunity for me to practice doing community-based research, but also to apply ideas I have been learning about in the PhD program within a 'practical, real world' context.  It will also give me an opportunity to do research on many of areas of emerging theory that could relate to, help support and/or help inform the work that Sobaz is doing with iMOVe.