Community Agency Partnerships: Best Practices for the Creation of Healthy Communities

By Esha Rana

Healthy communities are the foundation and backbone of a healthy society. In their absence, young people in particular can become adrift and bereft of support and opportunities. They might also turn to gangs for social validation and belonging. According to Statistics Canada, 651 homicides in Canada in 2018 were directly linked to street gangs or organized crime. According to Public Safety Canada, in 2002, there were 434 youth gangs in the country with 7,000 members—a number that would have likely gone up by 2018.

Due to the multi-layered nature of the problem, no single social agency can address the issue and most of them recognize that a network response is the best response. This partnership approach to community issues, however, is a relatively new area that lacks in research and evidence-based solutions. How does a network come together? What does a high-functioning network look like?

Recognizing the long-term importance and the immediate timeliness of the issue, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) awarded the College and Community Social Innovation Fund (CCSIF) funding for this social innovation project.

A research team from Humber, in collaboration with community partner organizations, examined the effectiveness of community agency partnership networks and identified the best practices for maintaining and creating these types of partnerships.

Inspiration for conducting social innovation research project

It was a stroke of serendipity that led Ann Wallington, Principal Investigator, to meet the community partners of the project. The organizations’ representatives were in Toronto to meet with the Toronto police about gang intervention strategies. Later, they had a meeting with Ann. All of them understood what was happening on the ground and what needed to be done. Ann states:

“As a former police officer, I see how there needs to be significant community support if we want to stop crime. Putting people in jail is one method, but it’s not the long-term method. We’ve seen that repeatedly.

The people that I met with were so engaged with and so committed to what they were doing. I really wanted to connect with them and understand what the front-line social services were doing and bring that back to my classroom for my students as well.”  — Ann Wallington, Acting Associate Dean in Humber’s Faculty of Social & Community Services

Project goals

The main goal of the project is to help reduce youth gang violence in Canada. To that end, the project focuses on achieving three main objectives:

• Identify the best practices for developing and maintaining community agency partner relationships.
• Identify gaps in services.
• Ensure currently provided programs follow best practices in terms of being trauma-informed, culturally-informed, free from systemic racism and committed to reconciliation efforts.

Research team

Ann Wallington is currently the Acting Associate Dean in the Faculty of Social & Community Services at Humber College. She holds a Master of Laws from Osgoode Law School/York University and a Master of Arts from Central Michigan University, with a research focus on gang intervention strategies. Previously, Ann was a Sergeant for 13 years with the Toronto Police Service. Through her experience and educational background, Ann provides Humber students with knowledge and expertise which are highly beneficial for future criminal justice professionals.

Ashley Hosker-Field, PhD, professor in the Bachelor of Social Science—Criminal Justice program at Humber’s Faculty of Social & Community Services is the co-investigator on this project. She received her PhD in Psychology from Brock University, where her work focused on examining psychopathic personality traits in relation to various external correlates. Since joining the Humber faculty team, she has been a co-investigator on two CCSIF-funded projects, one focusing on educating and engaging cannabis consumers and the other aimed at providing evidence-based recommendations for improving interagency collaboration to provide optimal support for at-risk youth. For the latter, Ashley has had previous experience with the John Howard Society. She shares:

“Before attending graduate school, I was employed as a youth worker, and my experience in that role is part of what inspired me to pursue further education in the Criminal Justice field. When professor Wallington asked me to be part of the research team, I was grateful for the opportunity to reconnect with the organization in a different capacity. Although COVID created a significant challenge in terms of both engaging in and assessing interagency collaboration, we did find that our results were largely consistent with the existing literature in the field. Going forward I hope to continue our research examining interagency collaboration within the social service sector in the post-COVID environment.”  — Ashley Hosker-Field, PhD, Academic Program Manager in Humber’s Faculty of Social & Community Services

Participation of students

With six research assistants, the project had a select and strong team to effectively complete its various phases. Ann realized the sensitive nature of the work they were doing and always tried to create a safe and inclusive learning environment. On navigating that double-edged sword, she says:

“There’s a balance where you’re trying to create this safe environment, but you also have to introduce issues that are uncomfortable and ensure that students can deal with that tension. They must be able to understand what needs to happen, know that we’re not quite there yet and still be able to move forward to create the services, to create the network that we’re hoping to create to make communities safer, to make them healthier and to ensure that they are able to prosper. Most of our students realize there are other aspects that need to be in place and provide a foundation so that the criminal justice system is the last system and not the first one. That’s what I try to instill in my students—how to solve the roots of the problems and not stay stuck addressing its symptoms or its results.” — Ann Wallington, Acting Associate Dean in Humber’s Faculty of Social & Community Services

Milestones

Since the project started right when the pandemic did, making it through COVID-19 and getting all the research done was a major milestone for the team. Ann specifies, “What was most satisfying for me was being able to talk to frontline workers about their day-to-day experiences and also seeing the overlap between agencies in the kinds of the challenges they have, the things that work well, the challenges about the policy issues sometimes that are in place that really impact whether they can do their job and do it well.”

Challenges

Since the project began at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the team had to face and work with unforeseen challenges right from the start. The biggest one was the distance. Reflecting on the hurried scramble to turn everything virtual, Ann shares, “It was so hard to connect with people online. When you’re doing interviews and talking to people about their clients, the trauma they’re dealing with, how it’s handled and how it’s managed, it’s a lot easier to have that conversation in person. I think in-person is much better for data collection, particularly those types of interviews.”

Potential impact

The results of the research study will provide community partners with real data on the effectiveness of the current partnership network and any gaps in client service. The data can be used to add new partners and strengthen existing partnerships by addressing concerns with the maintenance of network.

The project may also help not-for-profit agencies maintain their often-limited funding and allocate it efficiently. Non-profits must often rely on grants and any research that provides evidence-based data can strengthen their grant applications in demonstrating the efficiency and effectiveness of their programs and network response.

By strengthening and supporting these organizations, the project may help to combat the negative impacts of youth gang violence on communities. Meeting the needs of at-risk youth can help to ensure both short-term and long-term community health.

We acknowledge the support of the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC). Nous remercions le Conseil de recherches en sciences naturelles et en génie du Canada (CRSNG) de son soutien.