A new project, led by Dr. Erin Cameron, Academic Director at the Dr. Gilles Arcand Centre for Health Equity at NOSM University, has received a $2.43-million Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant to address local health priorities.
Dr. Cameron and her team will foster relationships between communities and academics. The project will study how academic institutions can direct their education, research, and service activities to address community needs, both locally and globally. The growing global social accountability research movement urges academics to heed this call.
“Social accountability as a research movement is still largely under-studied. This project will explore the transformative potential of a socially accountable research network for fostering partnerships and institutional change. NOSM University—and its many strong institutional and organizational partnerships across Northern Ontario, in Canada, and around the world—are primed to lead this work,” says Dr. Erin Cameron.
Dr. Cameron, who is also an adjunct member in the Faculty of Education at Lakehead University, is excited to invest in and strengthen partnerships across institutions, organizations, and communities regionally, nationally, and internationally.
Supported in part by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) Partnership Grant of $2.43-million over seven years, the total project of $3.2-million focuses on collecting and sharing best practices related to social accountability and scaling existing research projects on social accountability across new sites and settings. The project will also build capacity for socially accountable research. Co-directors in the project, Drs. David Marsh, Joseph LeBlanc, and Alex Anawati, along with a team of over 20 researchers and 12 partner organizations, aim to create and grow a connected social accountability research network.
Established in 2021 as the Centre for Social Accountability, the Dr. Gilles Arcand Centre for Health Equity was born of the immutable conviction that everyone—regardless of circumstance or geography—deserves the dignity of equal access to health-care practitioners who are culturally competent, understand the realities of living in the rural and remote North, and lead with compassion and integrity.
