Agricultural and rural regions across Ontario are confronted with opportunities and challenges as they chart their future directions. Too often, agricultural and rural regions have limited human and financial resources to understand, re-imagine, design, and implement new directions. The Pathways to Practice proposal will serve to overcome this dilemma by building bridges between graduate students, rural economic development officers, and rural community leaders to connect knowledge, ideas, and networks. This proposal focuses on creating an in-person forum for facilitating these connections, creating a series of new knowledge outputs, and training/mentorship. The outcome of the initiative will create new knowledge outputs, new training, and new networks to support agricultural and rural communities throughout Ontario.
The objectives of the proposed project are:
- to create a forum for graduate students to engage with local government officials, economic development officials, and rural development practitioners to share research
- to create a series of 4-6 knowledge outputs highlighting themes from the forum;
- to build capacity and skill set development for knowledge translation and transfer among graduate students
Project Resources
Stay tuned – project outputs are forthcoming in fall 2024
Project Partners
- Peter Smith, Canadian Centre for Rural Creativity
- Casandra Bryant, Canadian Centre for Rural Creativity
- Belinda Wick-Graham, Economic Development Council of Ontario
- Gateway Centre of Excellence in Rural Health
- Community Futures Huron
- Huron County Economic Development
Funding
This research is funded by the Ontario Agri-Food Innovation Alliance, a collaboration between the Government of Ontario and the University of Guelph.