Co-researchers can play a key role in projects and are an integral part of the team at TNC. Co-researchers have taken active roles in areas such as project planning and development, administration, data collection, facilitation, and analysis. They each bring unique perspectives, skills, and lived experience that often makes the projects they are involved in more valid and impactful for the communities they intend to benefit.

I am a family co-researcher and team member on one of TNC’s current projects, Evaluating Youth and Family Engagement in the Youth Wellness Hubs Ontario Initiative. The team supporting this project are located all over Ontario and have been working remotely together for the past two years on the project. Recently we took part in a series of reflection sessions where the co-researcher team shared insights about their experiences and engagement throughout project. These sessions were fully developed and facilitated by myself and another co-researcher on the team. The sessions allowed for open sharing and reflection on what makes co-researcher teams successful and how to overcome barriers associated with remote teamwork and engagement.

Obviously, technology plays a key role in virtual engagement with a remote team of co-researchers. Programs such as Zoom, Microsoft Teams and Google Drive can support connectivity and collaboration. However, technology can only take you so far when it comes to engaging a team virtually. Are there also a set of intangible attributes and processes that lead to enhanced engagement and better team success when working through virtual means?

Our co-researcher team shared their reflections about key approaches needed to ensure remote teamwork and engagement are a success. Here’s what we learned:

Flexibility: Flexibility is key when working within a team of co-researchers, or within any team for that matter. Understanding that co-researchers may lead busy, sometimes complicated lives, is instrumental in how we organize our work, schedule meetings, and perform cohesively as a team. Co-researchers may be supporting project work on top of school, work, raising children, and other tasks that demand their time. Flexibility to meet them where they are at is important to ensure their participation and engagement. Here are a few ways to support flexibility within your team of co-researchers:

• Find times to meet virtually that work for everyone. This means being flexible with your time and possibly working outside regular daytime hours or on weekends. Use apps such as doodle.com to help organize and schedule your team meetings and if a member can’t attend the meeting, be sure to connect with them at a later date.
• Grant co-researchers the opportunity to self-identify areas in which they would like to take on a more active role or allow them to opt-out of certain tasks. Be flexible with what is expected of them while allowing for structured learning and growth opportunities.
• Flexibility with timelines is important when working within a team of co-researchers. Consider structuring extra time into your project at the very beginning or revise workplans to include time to support co-researchers as needed throughout the project.

Connection- During the co-researcher reflection sessions it was noted that a sense of connection was important for team members when it came to engagement. Co-researchers not only wanted to feel more connected to the work itself, but also build more connections socially with the other co-researchers. Some ways to support a deeper connection with a team of co-researchers include:

• Check-in regularly with the team and individually with each co-researcher.
• Build a safe and comfortable atmosphere by structuring time for relationship building at the beginning of the project.
• Allow for open sharing and life updates at the beginning of each meeting to build stronger relationships and gain a deeper understanding of co-researcher life circumstances.
• Find ways for co-researchers to connect socially outside of the project, if so desired. There are many free social messaging apps online that can support this.

Sharing: To work collaboratively and effectively within a team of co-researchers, a large amount of sharing and transparency is needed. Co-researchers need to be aware of the happenings within the project at every step so that their work can be done with full knowledge and clarity. It also helps if co-researchers understand how their work within the project directly impacts the larger picture. Here are some ways to support sharing throughout your project:

• Share regular updates about how the project is progressing and what areas each co-researcher is working on.
• Give clear, transparent expectations throughout the project. Make sure that co-researchers are aware of all the key players involved, the deliverables, and timelines.
• Share the impact of the co-researcher work. Make sure to showcase where co-researcher feedback, direction, and efforts have directly impacted or enhanced the project.
• Allow co-researchers to share their reflections on how the work is progressing or how they are feeling engaged throughout the project.
• Don’t forget that co-researchers bring many skills, perspectives, and knowledge that they can share! Find space for learning and sharing from co-researchers by having them facilitate meetings or develop trainings for the entire co-researcher team. We can gain a lot by sharing and learning from each other.

While technology can go a long way to supporting engagement when working virtually with teams of co-researchers, there is so much more to be gained by changing the way we connect and interact as a team online. The human and personal aspects of working as a team cannot be dismissed just because we are not in the same room or share the same office.  We must remain flexible to learning and growth by sharing and building deeper connections as a team- virtual or not.

 

Learn more about our talented co-researchers here.

In celebration of TNC’s 10^th anniversary on May 20^th, 2020, we are creating a series of posts that reflect our practice and mission.

Leading up to TNC’s 10^th anniversary our team has been reflecting about projects that stood out to us. As we met with our faces floating virtually, a few themes began to emerge of common areas of work. These themes resonated because while working on these projects we’ve made some great friendships, gotten to know and better understand the people our clients serve, and built our clients’ capacity to do good work. We feel truly fortunate to be a part of these inspiring change efforts!

One area that stood out was our work with co-researchers, who are members of the community with lived experience that we’ve hired to help us conduct evaluations, and our research exploring related topics of leadership and engagement. TNC currently involves 8 co-researchers as active members of our team. This area of our work is important to us. By involving those with lived experience in research it puts into practice our commitment to listen deeply to the voices of those impacted most by our work. It has been our experience that projects with co-researchers are also more likely to lead to actions and positive impacts in our communities. Another important reason to involve members of the community in evaluation is to increase their capacity as professionals, so they can explore areas of future work and gain transferable skills. Co-researchers might also broaden their understanding of the service systems they are affected by so they can better navigate and gain access to essential services. We’ve learned that involving members of the community in evaluation can be an intervention in itself!

Involving co-researchers makes programs and services more impactful!

Our evaluation of Boys and Girls Clubs of Canada’s national Lead UP program (2017-2021) really exemplifies the benefits of involving co-researchers. In the first year of this project, our team explored youth leadership programming at six pilot Clubs to inform a youth leadership program toolkit and scale the program nationally. As part of this process, TNC recruited 4 youth co-researchers at each Club (24 total) to collect data by running focus groups and Photovoice projects with their peers at the Club. We heard from the youth and staff involved that youth feedback about the program was more authentic because their peers were involved in gathering stories about the program. Participants felt more at ease about discussing their experiences in the program. Youth also shared that by taking part in co-researcher training sessions and gaining experience in facilitation they were able to learn invaluable life skills. This unique co-researcher approach was possible because BGCC, as a leader in child and youth programming in Canada, was eager to try new and innovative solutions to meet the needs of the young people they serve.

We’ve learned about youth engagement by doing youth engagement!  

TNC has worked closely with Big Brothers Big Sisters of Canada for a number of years exploring the impact of the foundational relationships between their mentors and mentees. We value their mission as a national mentoring leader in Canada to foster life-changing relationships between children and adults that spark future success. We are currently working with BBBSC on a demonstration project to explore a new coaching model for youth engagement. As part of this work, TNC is coaching a young member of BBBSC’s National Youth Council (Project Lead) to conduct a comprehensive needs assessment and design a toolkit for Big Brothers Big Sisters agencies to guide them in implementing youth engagement projects locally.

BBBSC is committed to building the capacity of youth with the skills to achieve their personal goals and grow professionally. By involving our team as project “coaches” BBBSC has been able to support the Project Lead’s growth and learning as she conducts a complex national evaluation project for the first time. Through ongoing reflection and learning exercises with the Project Lead, TNC has also learned about youth-led mentorship and training approaches. Through this project BBBSC has gained an edge in distilling the ‘need-to-have’ resources for effective youth engagement. Having a young person lead the project has helped ensure the work stays grounded in a young person’s perspective and will be relevant to youth locally.

Working alongside youth produces stronger evaluation methods and findings!

Locally, we have worked with the SEED, Everdale Farm, Lutherwood Employment Services, 2^nd Chance Employment Counselling, and the County of Wellington-Ontario Works to evaluate their Good Food Work Experience. This program provides experiential learning and employment opportunities within the food system to youth in Guelph and Wellington who have faced barriers to employment or education.

Aligned with the values of the program, TNC is committed to providing further employment opportunities to youth. This year, we employed a youth co-researcher who was instrumental in planning our evaluation so that it would be more engaging and accessible for youth. She was also employed at the SEED and provided important feedback to contextualize the evaluation findings. By working alongside her, we have learned more about supporting youth who face barriers to employment, and produced more relevant evaluation tools, and stronger evaluation findings.

Working with co-researchers can build their capacity as professionals and researchers!

For the past two years, TNC has been working in partnership with the Centre of Excellence for Child and Youth Mental Health (“the Centre”) to evaluate youth and family engagement initiatives across Ontario. As leaders in the field of youth and family engagement, the Centre has been an incredible ally in this work and has modeled effective engagement for us as we learn about effective and innovative approaches to meaningful involvement.

As part of this work, TNC hired a team of three youth and two family co-researchers with lived experience in the mental health system to helps us evaluate the project. TNC works closely with this incredible group of talented people by providing evaluation training sessions and involving them in evaluation tasks. During the project, the co-researcher team helped inform project design and planning, facilitated meetings, interviews, and focus groups, and analyzed qualitative data. Their feedback has been invaluable to the project. Fortunately, their involvement has also benefited the co-researchers themselves!

They’ve shared that the experience has helped prepare them for post-secondary education and gave them transferable skills that can be used in other contexts:

“I want to pursue a Masters … so research and evaluation in that respect was super important, so for me it was a really great learning opportunity in terms of being able to learn valuable skills in research and evaluation that I didn’t know before…” – Co-Researcher

“By providing training and coaching, co-researchers had the opportunity to build the skills necessary to perform the outlined tasks in a more meaningful and effective way. Many of these trainings incorporated transferable skills, like facilitation and interviewing techniques or analysis training, that could be used in other areas.” – Co-Researcher

The team also felt that what they are learning through their involvement on the project has been catered to their unique backgrounds and learning goals:

“I feel like those trainings were necessary a lot of the time, because I don’t come from that research and evaluation background. I really loved how the trainings were tailored to our own understanding… the concepts around the training and lessons were explained in language that was accessible for people who weren’t coming from research and evaluation background… they were really important” – Co-Researcher

To make sure our co-researchers feel heard and that we are embedding the principles of engagement through our work, two of our co-researchers were recently invited to lead reflection sessions to explore successes and challenges in our work together over the past year. Key learnings from these sessions are summarized in part 2 of this blog.