Looking Back on a Week at CAURA and Congress

We’re tired. Tired but charged. What a week this has been.

• ResearchImpact was featured in 3 conference presentations; thanks to SSHRC, Harris Centre (MUN) and USask for participating in the ResearchImpact session at CAURA.

• ResearchImpact was noted by Gisele Yasmeen (VP Partnerships, SSHRC) in her talk “Knowledge Mobilization and the Canadian Community”

• Chad Gaffield, President of SSHRC, noted York’s ResearchSnapshot research summary series in his remarks at the open session “Capturing the Impact of Publicly Funded Social Sciences and Humanities Research”

• May 27 at Congress saw the highest web traffic for the month on the new www.researchimpact.ca site launched at Congress

• ResearchImpact shared the podium with SSHRC and The Federation of the Humanities and Social Science

• ResearchImpact met with our KM colleagues at Harris Centre (MUN) and University of Saskatchewan to map out future KM collaborations and options for the growth of ResearchImpact

• ResearchImpact supported UVic’s Office of Community Based Research in their leadership of Community Based Research Canada

• The May 2009 edition of Mobilize This! was the longest newsletter in ResearchImpact history reflecting the excitement that we have generated this month

This is the third year in a row ResearchImpact has had a presence at CAURA and Congress. We emerged on the research landscape two years ago as a new idea and were seen for the KM experiment we were. Well funded by SSHRC and CIHR we were nothing but a good idea whose time had not yet come. In the words of a colleague from Montreal, “we had only started to get nowhere”. Two years later we are definitely getting somewhere. We are Canada’s knowledge mobilization network and even though future funding is uncertain we’re certain we need it and we are committed to growing ResearchImpact as a network of universities and their local research partners.
Look out Concordia, here we come!