Catalyzing Staff Expertise for Community Impact: CESI's 2024 Impact

2023-2024 has been a year of reconnection, creative collaborations, and catalyzing CESI staff expertise. We continue to work together to carry out our mandate to increase the range and impact of community-engaged scholarship in our communities while staying rooted in our key values. By honoring diverse forms of knowledge, using our resources to amplify voices in our communities, and fostering mutually beneficial collaborations, we continue to advance our work in carrying our community-engaged projects and initiatives that use anti-oppression and critical engaged scholarship principles.

Over the course of a given year, CESI engages with over 50 community organizations and on-campus partners, hundreds of students, and several local, national, and international networks. We also recognize that a lot of the impact we create can be hard to quantify, as building capacity for community engagement, for example, is a lot more than just project outputs.

With this in mind, the CESI team is pleased to share three initiatives that highlight the diversity of the work we do and how we work together to meet and advance our strategic goals. The following profiles were selected as they each showcase the unique ways in which the CESI team works in collaboration with each other, and partners, to mobilize critical scholarship.

Lasting Connections through International Collaboration

A 'summer school' partnership program brought together researchers from various disciplines to learn how to plan and conduct ethical and sustainable community-engaged research as well as how to mobilize knowledge to achieve meaningful social change.

Mapping for Increased Access in our Community

A collaborative team of researchers from the University of Guelph and the City of Guelph mapped out available public washrooms across the city. The team's recommendations to the City government aim to increase washroom access and dignity for community members.

Promoting Crucial Conversations around Disability & Sexuality Supports

CESI was a key partner in the Sexuality and Access Project 2023, a collaboration to centre the lived experiences of individuals with disabilities and their service providers to support conversations and mutual understandings around the intersections of sexuality and disability.

CESI By The Numbers | 2023-2024 Key Metrics