STRATEGIC PLAN PRIORITY 5
Empower Faculty & Staff
CBU’s Office of Research and Graduate Studies (ORGS) constructed the foundations for a thriving and vibrant research culture this past year with the launch of a collaborative and inclusive Strategic Research Plan for 2020-2025. The Plan issues a call to action for researchers to take part in research networks, to build on existing strengths and reveal new ones. ‘Better Together’ is a central theme of the Plan with an excitement for the capacity-building possibilities it offers.
“The Strategic Research Plan presents a vision for internal research partnerships, as well as those supporting the local community and broader national and international research pursuits,” says Dr. Dana Mount, Associate Dean, Research and Graduate Studies, who was instrumental in the Plan’s development. “The Plan recognizes that our size is our strength. We are small enough to reach across campus to share an idea or lend a hand, yet big enough to see across our Island and beyond,” she adds.
Photo taken prior to March 2020.
As an action recommended by CBU’s Research Committee of Senate, ORGS responded with a Plan that is deeply connected with CBU’s Strategic and Academic Plans. It was developed through faculty engagement, reflecting the conversations and research paths shared by faculty in focus groups and written contributions. The Plan includes targets for social impacts, inspiring infrastructure and research leadership and community engagement.
A key research focus at CBU now and moving forward is grounded in the Better Together initiative. Better Together is CBU’s commitment to equity diversity and inclusion in the workplace. CBU received an EDI Capacity Building Grant through the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC), the federal funding agency for university-based research.
“The focus on Better Together will help us build a framework to gain the benefits of a truly diverse workplace, which includes identifying and removing systemic barriers to recruitment, retention and promotion of researchers,” says Dr. Brann-Barrett, Associate Vice President, Academic and Research.
Photo taken prior to March 2020.
An empowering description of that commitment is shared in the Strategic Research Plan: “We believe that success in our equity, diversity and inclusion efforts will make us more resilient, innovative and strengthen the impact of research in our communities – we are better together.”
Better Together was launched in 2020 with a Diversity Census and Inclusion Survey, followed by virtual discussion groups. Over 61 per cent of CBU employees took part in the census. Analysis and recommendations will be compiled by the Canadian Centre for Diversity and Inclusion. The intent is to learn from the employee experience to help inform the creation of an employee-wide Equity Diversity Inclusion Strategy (EDI), with planned completion in 2022.
Specific to the research environment, and in tandem with the institutional EDI strategy, ORGS is developing an EDI Action Plan for the Canada Research Chair Program (CRC). This will allow CBU to align our practices with national requirements to ensure that EDI is paramount in our research enterprise. This includes the process of nominating and awarding the prestigious CRC designation.
“It will contribute to the goal of empowering researchers to see how we can work intentionally to continue to build a strong and equitable research culture, pushing forward to achieve our best potential,” says Dr. Brann-Barrett.