Ground
Works

Our team of forest scientists, landscape architecture faculty and students, and communications staff collectively develops virtual, embodied forest experiences. These experiences enable us to invite those who care about forest landscapes to think together with us about positive futures for our working landscape. Conventional decision making processes often aim to communicate static scientific information to constituents through data and written form, limiting the agency of individual recipients who are not offered avenues for meaningful contribution to the ideas they receive. Our work is a direct challenge to this dynamic, developing an alternative way of working that uses three-dimensional, visually immersive, artistic virtual reality models to create a shared space for iterative idea generation. In this shared space we welcome community members, landowners, policymakers, and many others to experience the virtual forest and share ideas about ways of sustainably managing the land towards a more sustainable climate future. Each of these groups has different and often competing goals that are not easily resolved through discussion and feedback processes such as community meetings or stakeholder focus groups. In contrast, the virtual forest has allowed participants to identify shared values about the working landscape which result in buy-in and connection to the land, its management, and others who care about the working forest. This has resulted in advocacy for sustainable forest management, adoption of sustainable forest management practices, and critical feedback which has helped the academic team to hone and refine our virtual forest models.

In this article, the authors trace the origins of a unique partnership between a community music school in Toronto, Canada and a  neighboring  university. Co-authored by Dr. Richard Marsella, Executive Director of Community Music Schools of Toronto, and Dr. Amy Hillis, Assistant Professor of Music at York University, their commentary discusses the origins of an endowed, community-university partnership with the Helen Carswell Chair in Community-Engaged Research in the Arts at York University. This partnership supports and facilitates research projects that benefit community arts organizations and the Jane Finch community, an underserved neighborhood near York University and home to the "Community Music Schools of Toronto at Jane Finch." From advancement and knowledge mobilization, through to design and defining a shared mission, this article unpacks the process of building a partnership between a community music school and a university. Dr. Marsella and Dr. Hillis share their unique perspectives in a discussion of the partnership’s challenges, successes and continued evolution. They question how to build an ideal relationship between researchers and research partners that has sustainable alignment between research topics and research needs. How can creativity and artistry be used to support university researchers' objectives in alignment with a community music organization’s infrastructure? This article includes 1) analyses of case studies from the first five years of the partnership’s existence, including research projects that cultivated long-term relationships between researcher and community music school, and 2) recommendations for other academic and community institutions to develop similar partnerships.