Community Scholar 

For the past five years, Heather De Forest has worked to expand the Community Scholars Program, which provides free access to scholarly publications to staff members at nonprofits and charities throughout British Columbia.

Launched in response to a community-identified need, the Community Scholars Program has grown to include seven publishers offering free online access to more than 20,000 titles. “Participants have told us that having access to otherwise-paywalled scholarly publications has contributed to their ability to secure grant funding for their projects; to design, implement, and evaluate successful programs; to engage in professional development; [and] to participate in policy discussions on an equal footing,” says De Forest.

“However, it’s critical to recognize that knowledge and benefit doesn’t flow in just one direction—i.e., it’s not just from the academic institution to the community,” says De Forest. 

“The deep experiential and domain knowledge held in the nonprofit world is powerful—our program relies on it,” she says.

She has also been instrumental in her role on the Making Research Accessible initiative (MRAi) steering committee, centering Vancouver’s downtown eastside, a vibrant but marginalized community and the subject of much academic research. That research is usually inaccessible to community members, and DeForest is part of an initiative to make the research available through a portal designed for community use, using licensing agreements that share full text or preprints of materials.

To make sure the research isn’t just theoretically accessible but actually useful, De Forest, with University of British Columbia librarian Aleha McCauley, brought library staff, students, and community members together for a daylong metadata-a-thon to make the database searchable by terms the community uses, which increased usability and reduced stigma.