News
DTES RESEARCH
ACCESS PORTAL
Bringing together resources for community-based research
Barbara Jenni
PhD Student
Faculty of Education, University of Victoria
Community-based research (CBR) is a deeply collaborative process and good CBR makes research more beneficial for everyone involved. During the fall term of 2020, I was able to contribute to the DTES RAP as a visiting student with UBC’s Faculty of Education. Our course instructor Dr. Alison Taylor gave EDST 583 students the option to engage in action-oriented scholarship and support the community work and social justice goals of an organization instead of writing a final term paper. In my doctoral studies, I explore the university as a site of knowledge creation, including how we can make knowledge more accessible to reduce social inequities. I immediately knew I wanted to volunteer with the Making Research Accessible Initiative (MRAi) when UBC’s Learning Exchange student learning coordinator Matt Hume mentioned it during his (virtual) visit with our class. Although I have extensive work experience in community-based settings, this action project was a first opportunity for me to step outside the academic bubble and apply my own research interests in a practical way. Matt and Alison connected me with Dr. Heather Holroyd, community-based research coordinator at the UBC Learning Exchange, who would act as my project supervisor. We agreed that I would focus my energies on the Downtown Eastside Research Access Portal (DTES RAP) resources page.
The DTES RAP is organized into several sections. The resources section features toolkits, links, articles, and other resources about CBR. My main task was to expand the existing resources, which were already broadly organized into four categories. I started with a review of a report prepared by UBC Urban Ethnographic Field School students Mirella Livoti, David Cho, and Bryan Leung, who had collected potential resources for the RAP resources page in summer 2020, and then I examined the existing RAP Resources page. I proposed small edits as well as reconceptualizing the resource categories, with the goal to clarify what is included in the RAP resources page and why. From here, we determined that the aims of the page are to support university-based researchers, community organizations, and residents who were already engaged in or looking to learn more about CBR. The four renamed categories now organize the resources to follow along four core steps of CBR: from doing the groundwork, to making an action plan, to sharing findings, and eventually to using research for the public good. In the end, I was able to provide a final document with 50 new potential items for the RAP resources section (over 95 per cent accessible online at no cost) along with short descriptions of each item to the MRAi operations team and to discuss my suggestions at one of their meetings.
It is not a given for student researchers that their own scholarly interests and personal values fully align with coursework assignments or research assistantships, which is why this action project with the DTES RAP was truly meaningful to me. Reciprocally, I hope my contributions will be helpful in two ways: first, there is the practical goal that the resources will help populate the DTES RAP resources page and move it to a (more) fully developed segment of the portal. More importantly though, I hope the resources will find their way to supporting university-based researchers, community organizations, and residents in learning about and planning to collaborate in doing the work as well as finding ways to exchange knowledge in equitable and impactful ways – after all, good CBR makes research more beneficial for everyone involved.
