Accounting for Community Impact: Thinking Across the Spaces and Times of a Seven-year Pan-Canadian Community-based Research Project

Governments and private funders are placing increasing demands on postsecondary institutions and community- based organizations to account for the impacts from their collaborative research and learning efforts. In this article, we explore how best to account for impacts arising from the Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement project (CFICE; 2012– 2019), a collaboration of over 30 postsecondary institutions and 60 community partners from across Canada. In doing so, we note the strengths and, in particular, the weaknesses of the theory of change rationalist approach to evaluation in tracking impacts favored by funders. Seeking a more thorough understanding of how community- campus engagement activities impact collaborators, we turn to the theories of David Harvey, Basil Bernstein, and Norman Fairclough for a deeper account of the space- times of social practices and of how social change actually occurred in three examples of CFICE activity. We argue that rationalist program planning and evaluation models with currency in community- campus engagement activities need supplementing with more nuanced and theoretical accounts of how community impacts and social change actually happen over time within complex and multi- scalar contexts. Such scholarship can better inform funding agendas that do not always seek to place communities first. sustainability measures within a local, large- scale residential infill development project. SLOE drew on the CFICE partnership to produce several tangible research outputs, including a multi- themed report on sustainability options for the site; an experts forum directed at the developer, municipal representatives, and neighborhood residents to discuss suggested approaches; and more specific documents outlining site planning and energy alternatives for the development.