Oh, the places we’ll go: Learning about community-campus collaborations from Dr. Seuss and Machiavelli

Please join us on October 19 for a lunch and keynote talk with Dr. David Phipps. David is the Assistant Vice President of Research Strategy and Impact at York University, where he acts as the administrative lead for all research programs and oversees their impact on local and global communities. He also the Network Director for Research Impact Canada and serves on knowledge mobilization committees around the world.

In this talk, David will discuss how universities can best facilitate engagement with local community organizations, value lived experiences and community expertise, and encourage meaningful and productive collaborations.

“I have been supporting community-campus collaborations for a long time,” he says. “Not as long as Dr. Seuss and Machiavelli have been around, but these figures and their writing has served as inspiration for the ways community-university collaborations can happen. In this talk, I will also share lessons learned from the deep collaboration between York University and my partners from the United Way of Greater Toronto. I will talk about how our community and campus partners shaped a unique program where funder investments targeted community priorities and strengths rather than needs or deficits. Finally, I will discuss how our community and campus partners shaped a unique program where funder investments targeted community priorities and strengths rather than needs or deficits."

David has received honours and awards from the Canadian Association of Research Administrators, the Institute for Knowledge Mobilization, the International Network of Research Management Societies, and the European Union-based Knowledge Economy Network. He has a Ph.D. in Immunology from Queen’s University.