Students Serving / Servir les étudiants

At the University of Victoria, the Research Partnerships and Knowledge Mobilization unit (RPKM) is a campus and community-wide portal to support the development of transformative research. We bring outstanding researchers together with community partners to co-create knowledge for action –knowledge that is mobilized to improve the social, cultural and economic well-being of communities throughout our region and around the globe. Here’s a look at some of our projects with community partners in 2014.
À l’Université de Victoria, l’unité Partenariats en recherche et Mobilisation des connaissances (Research Partnerships and Knowledge Mobilization unit, RPKM) est un portail ouvert aux gens du campus et de la communauté, destiné à soutenir et à renforcer la recherche transformatrice. Nous réunissons des chercheurs exceptionnels et des partenaires de la communauté afin qu’ils créent ensemble un savoir en action – un savoir mobilisé dans le but d’améliorer le bien-être social, culturel et économique des collectivités de notre région et du monde entier. Voici quelques-uns des projets en cours en 2014.

Our Place volunteers
UVic students preparing and serving food during an Our Place breakfast

UVic business students help Our Place serve Victoria’s most vulnerable.
It isn’t easy serving over 1,200 meals per day on a tight budget. This is the dilemma that the Our Place Society finds itself in as it reaches out to Victoria’s most vulnerable.
This fall, Our Place contacted UVic for assistance and RPKM connected them with Heather Ranson, Associate Teaching Professor at the Gustavson School of Business and Associate Director at UVic’s Centre for Social & Sustainable Innovation (CSSI). Ranson’s service management students were ready and eager to help Our Place make the most of its resources. Using skills and training acquired during their education at UVic, these students examined different areas of the Our Place experience and formulated reports on how these areas could be improved.
“The students were very professional,” says Le-Ann Dolan, Director of Operations at Our Place. “Actually, they came in to sponsor and serve a breakfast themselves and got first-hand experience with the work we do before they began their research. We’ve never had that happen before.”
“The reports are fantastic,” adds Dolan. “Some of the report is so valuable we’ve applied for a summer student to come work at Our Place and implement some of these changes.”
For more information on the Our Place Society, click here.
For more information on the CSSI, click here.
This post was first published on March 13, 2015 on the University of Victoria’s Community Current blog.