Innovations in Rebuilding the Community Square Locally and Globally

Goal

The proposed research portfolio examines how intentional supports can impact community building in 90 communities around the world. Research shows there is a continuum of community relationships ranging from weak connections to strong bonds. Strong community bonds are related to improved wellbeing and human flourishing in a wide range of domains from health and education to perceptions of safety and happiness. We will bring together partners from multiple networks to identify and describe the characteristics of 'strong community bonds' from multiple cultural perspectives. The second phase of the study will test a portfolio of strategies to strengthen and sustain communities in these different contexts. Taking a portfolio approach to assessing community building strategies helps to identify whether these approaches are valid in diverse settings such as big and small, wealthy and poor, and urban and rural communities. The most robust results from this portfolio on innovations in community building may later be pilot tested in the development stage of Templeton World Charity Foundation's strategy for fostering human flourishing.

Opportunity

Previous research has mostly examined community building through correlational studies using self-report of indicators of health and wellbeing, based on a 1986 U.S. conceptualization of an individual's psychological sense of community. To transform scientific studies on this phenomenon, the proposed research portfolio will generate new knowledge from multi- and interdisciplinary bio-psycho-social conceptual frameworks across many and varied global contexts including but not limited to non-immigrant, immigrant, indigenous and post-colonial communities. It will support studies that have experimental, quasi-experimental and naturalistic longitudinal research designs examining changes in community and how intentional efforts to build community may vary by context.

Roadblocks

One of the challenges is providing clear direction without constraining the framework, methods, and use of funds. Innovation, by its nature, means testing new ideas that may not have significant evidentiary support so the coordinators of the project cannot provide advance details about the strategies or methods that will be applied in community building projects. Researchers will also need to address ethical issues of conducting research with communities before knowing how it may (or may not) benefit the community and its members.

Breakthroughs Needed

The biggest breakthrough needed in research on community building is to conduct studies using random assignment, which also addresses potential ethical roadblocks.
A flexible funding approach is required to rigorously assess innovative strategies for community building. This takes the form of having explicit funding guidelines (types of expenses allowed and excluded) and assessment standards while remaining open and flexible to different intervention strategies and methods. The perceived risk of this approach is managed by distributing smaller amounts of funding to multiple project teams to assess a wide-ranging portfolio of community building strategies.
New types of multi-disciplinary teams are also required to effectively design and assess new strategies. Academic researchers need to be more comfortable engaging in innovative activities directly with civil society and community leaders and innovators need to learn how to assess strategies and communicate effectively with academics to strengthen shared learning.
A relatively simple and powerful activity for conceptual blockbusting is informally sharing information among a large group of people working on similar ideas. Brief quarterly reports will take the place of lengthy project-end reporting to capture insights and ensure a learning orientation to projects. Bi-annual sessions with all grantees would build relationships and facilitate shared learning.

Key Indicators of Success

The success of this program will be indicated by communities supporting human flourishing. We expect to see an increase in the ability of communities to support individual and collective thriving locally. Longer term indicators of positive results would include a decrease in divisiveness locally and worldwide and a decrease in human conflicts and violence. The portfolio will show it is on track with the engagement of 100 leading researchers who consolidate disparate bodies of knowledge on community building and identify future directions for research. In five years, multi-disciplinary teams will have found substantial and concrete approaches to (re-)build community.

Additional Information

Technical summary
The proposed idea is to build the scientific foundation and community connections needed for 30 multi-disciplinary teams of researchers to conduct systematic and rigorous longitudinal studies over three years using experimental or quasi-experimental designs. The primary unit of analysis will be at the community level (k = 90). The sample size of individuals from each community will vary depending upon the research questions from a bio-psycho-social framework. Some studies will collect biological data such as levels of cortisol to assess stress and functional magnetic resonance imaging, or fMRI, to measure brain activity related to community building. Other studies will collect psychological and social data. Taken together, new scientific evidence will be generated about the impact of community building on individual human flourishing.
References
1. https://doi.org/10.1037/14954-013
2. https://www.urban.org/research/publication/trauma-informed-community-building-and-engagement/view/full_report
3. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4614-5583-7
4. https://doi.org/10.1596/978-1-4648-0779-4
5. https://doi.org/10.1353/cpr.2017.0010

Collaborators
Dr. Carrie Wright is a leading scholar and practitioner with knowledge and experience with social innovation approaches, with a particular focus on innovation in community and public sector environments. From 2011 to 2015 she led a $30M portfolio for a multi-ministry, multi-year initiative in the Government of Ontario, Canada to redesign services in the children's sector. The project included supporting and coaching multiple community networks who designed and tested innovations that addressed a priority need in their community. Learning from these projects was combined and presented as a portfolio of available approaches for government decision-makers. Her experience designing and supporting public sector social innovation ranges from building recycling infrastructure in the Caribbean to designing student services with university faculty in Afghanistan. She has lived and worked in the British Virgin Islands since 2015.
Dr. Colleen Loomis is faculty at the Balsillie School of International Affairs and Wilfrid Laurier University. She has expertise in learning-communities and psychological sense of community within geographical and relational communities. She has conducted research in the United States, Canada, Kenya, Madagascar, Laos, France, and Switzerland.
Dr. Terry Mitchell is a professor at Laurier University and the Balsillie School of International Affairs with expertise in Indigenous rights and resource governance, Indigenous-Settler relations, qualitative research, community-engaged scholarship and knowledge mobilization. Her research focuses on colonial trauma and Indigenous rights, and the intercultural.
Dr. C. Darius Stonebanks is Professor of Education at Bishop's University and an Adjunct Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University. He is the former Chair of the Research Ethics Board of Bishop's University. Since 2009, he is the Director of Transformative Praxis Malawi where he and his Malawian partners collaboratively seek ways of problem-solving that is community identified. He has served on national grant evaluation committees, chaired national doctoral award committees, and been principal investigator on nationally funded research.
Dr. Abdeljalil Akkari, professor and director of a research group on international education at the University of Geneva. He is also a regular consultant for UNESCO and other international organizations (Swiss cooperation agency, European Union). His major experiences and publications include studies on international cooperation and the execution of comparative research methods.