by

Wendy Kwong, Multicultural Health Consultant,

Toronto Public Health

and

Kenise Murphy Kilbride, Professor,

School of Early Childhood Education, Ryerson Polytechnic University

The Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) uses representatives from the non-academic sectors of the community on its panels that evaluate research proposals for funding. This brief report attempts to give a sense of the rationale, functioning, and outcomes of this practice.

The Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement (CERIS) is a national centre of excellence created and funded by a consortium of federal government partners at the instigation of the Metropolis Project team in the Ministry of Citizenship and Immigration Canada (CIC). The lead partner for the disbursement of funds is the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC), under whose rules the Centre operates in spending the $2 million dollars that have been awarded for the six years of its present contract.

Besides SSHRC and CIC, other federal funders contributing to the Metropolis Project's centres of excellence are: Health Canada, Human Resources, Canadian Heritage, Status of Women, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, Solicitor General's Office, and Statistics Canada.

The partners in CERIS are Ryerson Polytechnic University, the University of Toronto, and York University, and three community groups: the Community Social Planning Council of Toronto, the United Way of Greater Toronto, and the Ontario Council of Agencies Serving Immigrants. The three founding universities each have three representatives on the Management Board which governs the Centre; the community partners have one each, and a thirteenth voting member has been added from the Partnership Advisory Council (PAC), a committee of representatives of various sectors in the Greater Toronto Area, created to advise on the research agenda of the Centre. Two non-voting members represent the federal government.

The Joint Centre of Excellence for Research on Immigration and Settlement - Toronto proposed in its original submission to the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) that it would have an annual competition for research funds for research related to its major areas of interest, referred to as research domains. Such annual competitions are a rather ordinary way of proceeding and need no comment. What was unusual was that in its section of Management Structure, the proposal stated that it would strike "research domain subcommittees" to adjudicate the submissions and make "recommendations to the Management Board on the merits of research grant requests in each domain," and then specified that the membership of each of these subcommittees would number at least five: "a subcommittee chair, two board members drawn from Universities, plus two other members such as non-university members of the Management Board, members of the Partnership Council, or Project Partners."

In other words, the merit of research proposals, while "consistent with SSHRC application procedures," would not be decided exclusively by academics, but instead would be evaluated by a mix of academic and non-academic experts. These non-academics will be referred to hereafter as "community representatives", whether they be drawn from community agencies, municipal or regional authorities, or school boards, for example. In practice, both academics and community representatives possessing such expertise would be identified by recommendations from the various structures of the Centre. Names put forward went to the Executive Committee of the Board, which then presented a slate to the full Board for approval.

The reasoning underlying such a structure included factors such as:

• the presence in the community of people who regularly conduct research in related areas for their employers (for example, the Association of Educational Researchers of Ontario is represented on the PAC; similar researchers come from municipal planning offices, community agencies, etc.);
• immigrant communities have sophisticated researchers in their ranks, some of whom are partners on the proposals to be submitted; it stands to reason then that similar community researchers would, when nominated by the Management Board or PAC members, prove valuable adjudicators;
• besides those who are formally trained in research methods that they use in the course of their work, there are other representatives very knowledgable about the lived experience of the community, whose expertise can shed light on the value of proposed research, and who therefore would be helpful adjudicators.

As the researchers interested in the annual competition increased in the diversity of their research areas, their proposals required expertise in more than the original three areas. Academics were soon recruited from beyond the Management Board, and non-academic adjudicators, while having a larger number to draw from, also moved beyond the original terms of the proposal’s description, after Board approval.

The experience of using community adjudicators has proved valuable for the Centre’s work as well as instructive. Three rounds of competition (1996-1998) have drawn upon representatives from family service associations, public health offices, school boards, settlement agencies, social planning councils, local and metropolitan municipal offices, and interagency networks. The variety of experiences made the discussions within the panels richer than would otherwise have been the case, and the discussions addressing academic merit were sometimes enhanced by the insights into their relevance and the that community representatives could bring from their own work. And any concerns that some may have had about the potential of there being a split between the academics and community representatives on the panel were quickly laid to rest: no panel has ever identified that as an issue when they have reported on the outcomes of their deliberations. The division that may occasionally arise between qualitative and quantitative researchers on the academic side has not been echoed in divisions between academic and non-academic adjudicators. Rather, the kinds of contributions community panel members have made have included:

• detailed knowledge of the significance of a particular issue for a community,
• explanations of why proposal authors may have identified a particular approach to a community, based on their experience of the way in which communities are likely to respond to research requests
• availability of resources for researchers that may cut down on expenditures requested, and
• other insights.