Categories: Capacity Building

Community Knowledge, System Impact: A Decade of Research Leadership at Access Alliance

Introduction

As an organization dedicated to improving health outcomes for immigrants, refugees, and marginalized populations, Access Alliance recognizes that rigorous research rooted in lived experience is essential to building responsive, inclusive, and effective systems of care. This publication highlights the work we have undertaken over the past 10 years to strengthen evidence that informs policy,

A Quality Improvement Journey Using a Communication Ecosystem and Microsystem Approach for Improving Access to Care

What is the problem we needed to solve?

What is the biggest barrier clients face when trying to reach us by phone? Is it the system itself? During the COVID-19 pandemic, our organization was tasked with vaccinating individuals without OHIP coverage. The high demand for services overwhelmed our phone systems, leading to long wait times,

Access Alliance 2024 – 2025 Annual Planning and Evaluation Report 

Project Overview 

This report provides a comprehensive overview of Access Alliance’s planning and evaluation (P&E) activities from April 2024 to March 2025. These activities support evidence-informed decision-making and continual improvement of programs and services. The report summarizes 30 program evaluations.  

This annual activity creates an accountable evidence base that: 

Demonstrates to the Board,

Research in Action at the North American Refugee Health Conference 2025 

Conferences are spaces to showcase and celebrate our work. Done well, they are also spaces to connect with each other, to learn about each other’s work, in particular emerging and innovative ideas that might intersect with or inform our own work. 

Several Access Alliance staff recently attended and presented at the North American Refugee Health Conference 2025 in Niagara Falls.

Community Based Research Training for Peer Researchers 

Our training introduces Peer researchers, researchers in the community with lived experience or working with the population of interest, to ethical CBR practice.

Access Alliance 2023 – 2024 Annual Planning and Evaluation Report 

Project Overview 

At Access Alliance one of our goals is to build and sustain a healthy evidence-informed and evaluation-focused organization. We conduct evidence-informed planning through rigorous evaluation processes to demonstrate accountability at multiple levels and improve the quality of our programs and services. Working with program teams we gather evidence from diverse sources using tools that are accessible,

Best Practice Standards for Remote Program and Service Delivery

Without question, the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted us to rethink the way we offer programs and services. In 2020, Access Alliance, like many agencies, was forced to pivot swiftly to incorporate online and remote service delivery to respond to a rapidly emerging situation. Since then, we have recognized the value of including the option of online and remote service delivery for clients to improve access,

Our Community-based Research Tools

With over 10 years of experience in community based research, we have developed hundreds of hands-on CBR tools for making research inclusive, empowering and equity driven.

Our Centre can provide advisory support and institutional training on CBR to academics as well as community agencies interested in doing CBR. As a way to de-centre research,

Immigrant Insight Scholar Initiative

The Immigrant Insight Scholar (IIS) Initiative is a mentored paid fellowship program for un/underemployed internationally educated researchers/analysts (e.g., epidemiologists, qualitative researchers, statisticians, evaluation experts) to utilize and strengthen their skills, and develop the local experience, track record, and professional network needed to transition to a successful career as a researcher/analyst in Canada.

Young Insight Scholar Initiative

The Young Insight Scholar Initiative is a mentored fellowship program to build research/scholarly opportunities and career pathways for under-represented and equity seeking groups. We partner with academic and community agency partners to create these fellowships.
The Young Insight Scholar (YIS) is for young and emerging scholars/advocates (less than 30 years old) who are passionate about mobilizing evidence to advance equity.