Sprott researchers achieve 100 per cent success in SSHRC grants for collaborative research to benefit communities

Researchers from Carleton University’s Sprott School of Business have received Partnership Engage Grants from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) to facilitate collaborative research in the areas of Indigenous and social impact.

These grants assist non-academic organizations and postsecondary researchers to partner and access each other’s unique knowledge, expertise and capabilities on topics of mutual interest.

Funded Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated rates of homelessness and child hunger across the world, and without intervention these children will not fulfill their potential and will not break the poverty-hunger cycle. Although there are pockets of innovation attempting to feed children nutritious meals across the world, their efforts are not coordinated. The evidence on effective practices, business models and impact is also lacking. Therefore, there is a need to address this information gap to provide evidence for public policy development and create standard practices for all aspects of program development, meal production, distribution and impact chains. The purpose of this research is to develop an understanding of effective practice in providing nutritious meals to children in need.

This research will test a new process for aggregating impact measures with the aim of solving a tension between uniformity and relevance in impact measurement. Uniform measures are needed to aggregate and compare impact. It is important to aggregate impact to communicate the collective impacts of partnerships, investments, and the sector as a whole. However, the uniform measures chosen for aggregation purposes often have little relevance for the social purpose organizations that are doing the work. These organizations need customized measures that are tailored to their work and adaptable as they innovate. Relevant measures are associated with better innovation, learning and effectiveness.

This project will allow the research team to determine how a flexible impact measurement framework can enhance and hinder the competing impact measurement objectives of social finance funds and the social purpose organizations they fund. This will improve impact measurement for a specific social finance fund, create tools for other social finance funds, provide a middle ground that gives social purpose organizations more power and autonomy to articulate their own measures of impact when they receive funding from social finance funds, and deepen understanding of plasticity in accounting and, in particular, its relevance to non-financial measures like social impact.

There is a discrepancy between the numbers of Indigenous Peoples in Canada needing banking services and the prevalence of Indigenous employees in banking to serve or represent them. Indigenous banking needs include retail banking for individuals, business accounts and lending facilities for Indigenous entrepreneurs, and banking services for Indigenous communities. Yet there are relatively few Indigenous individuals working in the Canadian banking sector. A lack of Indigenous representation among banking staff may lead to consequences such as a lack of understanding of the needs and values of Indigenous clients, customers facing bias or discrimination, or inadequate savings, financial planning and investment advice.

To attract and retain Indigenous employees in the banking sector, a clear understanding of employment barriers encountered by Indigenous people in this sector is required.  However, only a minority of employers reported having consulted with Indigenous employees in identifying these barriers. This project proposes to address this lack of consultation by asking Indigenous employees in the banking sector about their experience working in the sector.

This research focuses on issues and challenges relating to establishing an urban reserve governed by three communities and on the social acceptance of the reserve by non-Indigenous stakeholders in Thunder Bay. The project has four objectives: investigating how three First Nations, from two different Treaty areas, should set up governance structures when undertaking the reserve’s development; identifying corporate board structure, revenue distribution and decision-making mechanisms to facilitate the development; examining how non-Indigenous community misconceptions and attitudes could impact the process; and, developing conceptual models on governance and strategies regarding how to secure ‘buy-in’ from the non-Indigenous community.