Students, professors, and community members are convening to work on issues affecting communities on a local, national, and international scale from May 25-29 at the C2U Expo 2015 hosted at Carleton.
Ted Jackson, one of the expo planners, said having people coming from all over Canada and the United States, as well as a number of other countries, is exciting.
“[It’s exciting to] hear what they’ve been doing in this whole area of community campus partnerships,” Jackson said.
According to Jackson, issues touched upon this year include food security, poverty reduction, and the environment. The conference kicks off with keynote speaker Dawn Harvard, interim president of the Native Women’s Association of Canada. Harvard will discuss the issue of missing and murdered aboriginal women.
“We’re very interested in the potential of how community-university partnerships can make a contribution to that,” Jackson said, “and to listen very carefully to aboriginal organizations . . . and what they think academia, faculty members and students can do on this very important issue.”
The C2U Expo occurs every two years. This is the sixth expo, with previous ones taking place in Saskatchewan, British Columbia, and Newfoundland. According to expo presenter Linda Hawkins, each event takes on the personality of the region it is hosted in.
“Each has had great success in revealing local and regional issues, but also tying them to national and international context,” she explained.
According to Jackson, a group at Carleton called Community First: Impacts of Community Engagement advocated to bring the event to Carleton.
He said there are numerous advantages to hosting the event at Carleton as faculty, students, and community partners are able to present their work on an international level while also learning from leaders on the issues.
The budget for hosting the event is $250,000, 40 per cent of which was payed for with participants’ registration fees, and the rest was covered by sponsors.
According to conference coordinator Nicole Bedford, the expo is expected to bring in close to 450 people. She explained that while the expo attracts a range of different individuals, the one thing they all have in common is their drive to improve the communities they live in.
“The conference has an amazing vibe for this reason, because everyone is coming together in one space to work together as a community, for the community,” she said.
Bedford said this year’s emphasis will be on action and skill-building so attendees can leave the conference with tools to increase the ability of community-campus partnerships.
While the expo will run from May 25-29, four workshops were also held at Algonquin College prior to the event. These presented different ways of improving community-campus partnerships.
“There’s a big question these partnerships answer . . . What is post-secondary education for?” Jackson said.
“Of course, they definitely are for gaining knowledge, generating knowledge, getting people ready for careers and so on,” he said. “But we think that university and colleges have a social responsibility to make a contribution to their communities, and these partnerships are one way to do that.”
