Interview with Tim Aubry
Tim Aubry is a professor at the School of Psychology and his main areas of research are housing, homelessness, and community mental health. The Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services at the Faculty of Social Science, where Aubry is a Senior Researcher, is working on numerous research projects on mental health and homelessness issues in cooperation with organisations and community agencies in Ottawa that are funded by United Way. It is in this context that he learned about the important role that United Way plays in this sector.
Last year, United Way raised a remarkable $417,000 at the University of Ottawa, an amount that places our workplace campaign fourth in Ottawa. Over 43 per cent of employees made a contribution, with an average donation of $350—approximately $15 per pay. This year’s campaign at the University which started last week seeks to raise $420,000.
Can you tell us about a project that was realised with the help of United Way?
Tim Aubry: One of the projects, in which we were involved, which received United Way funding, involved the tracking of homelessness in Ottawa. About five years ago, our research centre collaborated with the Alliance to End Homelessness in Ottawa, a coalition of over 70 organizations, to develop a report card on homelessness. The report card, which has been released annually beginning in 2004, is a systematic method of measuring over time the progress that we are making towards reducing, and hopefully, ending homelessness in our community.
The role of our research centre in the project has been to provide the Alliance with research support .A valuable outcome of the involvement of our centre in this project has been the training it has provided to our students. In particular, a group of students conducted, at the outset of the project, a review of the research literature on report cards. They have also helped over the course of this multi-year project with the production of the report card particularly as it relates to data analysis. The work has also led to an academic publication with two students as co-authors.
Is the project still going on?
T.A.: Yes, the Alliance is in the process of developing their sixth annual report, which is due to be released in March 2010. As well, the work has led to ten other communities across Canada taking up the idea and developing their own reports cards on homelessness.
What exactly is a report card and how does it work?
T.A.: The idea behind a report card is to monitor a set of relevant indicators related to a specific issue like homelessness that leads to an assessment of how things are changing over time. In the case of the report card put out by the Alliance, the indicators, which are tracked annually, are in the areas of housing (e.g., number of new affordable housing units created), income (e.g., amount of income provided monthly to social assistance recipients), and homelessness (e.g., number of different people using emergency shelters).
Who is providing the data?
T.A.: The data, which is in the public domain, originates from a number of sources including the City of Ottawa, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, and different ministries of the provincial government. The report card presents and interprets this data. As well, it provides information on efforts being made in Ottawa to address homelessness. It is produced as a booklet and circulated widely. It is also available on the web at www.endhomelessnessottawa.ca.
The report card is used by the Alliance for public education and advocacy purposes. It also receives a lot of media attention each year when it is released. In each report card, there is a set of recommendations about program and policy initiatives that the Alliance believes are needed to more effectively address the issue of homelessness.
How are students involved in the various projects that are funded by United Way?
T.A.: The work that we do at the Centre for Research on Educational and Community Services is research that is community-based and that is intended to help develop or improve services for vulnerable populations living in the community. As a result, many of our collaborations are with community agencies that are funded by the United Way. The work that is undertaken with these agencies is usually done by students with faculty from the research centre supervising them. These students have originated especially from the two sponsoring faculties of the centre, namely the Faculty of Social Sciences and the Faculty of Education.
Students involved at the centre in these projects take on the roles of researches, evaluators, consultants and the experience they receive makes an important contribution to their training. Some receive practicum or internship hours and others write their honours, masters or doctoral theses.
What can students learn from those projects?
T.A.: It has been our experience at our research centre that there are more training opportunities available through United Way-funded community agencies than ever, In addition to student involvement providing academic training , it can also lead to them working in the community sector after they graduate. Since our research centre opened in 2000, we have had over a hundred different students involved in various community projects through practicum and internship placements, theses, and research assistantships. As well, we have had a number of students who have gotten involved in projects on a volunteer basis.
A recent example of a project involved two students who developed doctoral theses investigating factors that assisted or impeded people from exiting homelessness and becoming re-integrated into the community. Specifically, Rebecca Nemiroff, a graduate student in clinical psychology, is focusing on women while Sophie Hyman, another graduate student in clinical psychology is studying youth. For this project we benefited from a partnership with all the emergency shelters and drop in centres in the city.
Ultimately, we hope that this training and research, while invaluable to students, will make a contribution to the important work being delivered by community agencies. We certainly want the sector and the organizations to derive benefit from the cooperation, to get something from it, so they are typically involved in helping us to define research questions through consultation. In some cases, agencies approach the centre with a particular research project in mind and we help them develop it.