Community-University Research Partnerships: Reflections on the Canadian Social Economy Experience

During the last months of the liberal federal administration of Paul Martin in Canada (2003–2006), after a sustained lobbying campaign led by Quebec’s Chantier de l’economie sociale and the Canadian Community Economic Development Network (CCED Network), funds were allocated to support the social economy sector of Canada, and a call was issued for research proposals on the social economy ‘conducted by academic researchers in partnership with community based organizations’. While the subsequent administration cancelled the general program everywhere except in Quebec, it retained the $15 million research program, which was modelled on the existing Community University Research Alliance (CURA), funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC). Through a peer review process, SSHRC selected and funded six regional nodes and one national hub to pursue this research agenda from 2006 to 2012. This unprecedented level of resources for a pan-Canadian exploration of the social economy, known as Canadian Social Economy Research Partnerships (CSERP), resulted in almost 400 studies, involving 16 universities and over 140 community-based organisations. This volume, Community-university research partnerships: Reflections on the Canadian social economy experience, describes the organisation of this large research effort. It provides context for chapters submitted by the hub and nodes, and concludes with directions for the future. A second volume, Assembling understandings, summarises the research findings across all the nodes. The third volume is Canadian public policy and the social economy. All three are available as free e-books at the website: http://socialeconomyhub.ca. In this research, the social economy included not only the voluntary non-profit sector, as Americans might define it, but also cooperatives, social enterprises and informal, emerging efforts. Four of the node principal investigators knew each other from prior membership in a professional association for studying cooperatives. The national hub for this research was located at the University of Victoria and co-directed by Ian McPherson, of the Gateways: International Journal of Community Research and Engagement Vol 6 (2013): 228–30 © UTSePress and the author