Teresa Goff

Abstract

Canadian journalism programs are facing significant structural contraction, driven by industry disruption and the rise of audit culture, a framework where financial accounting tools are used to measure performance across non-financial domains (Shore & Wright, 2015). Within this climate, conventional assessment models fail to capture the true civic value of journalism education. This paper contributes to the growing body of engaged journalism scholarship by adopting the language of audit culture to defend journalism’s intangible, relational aspects. It does so through a multidimensional framework designed to measure social impact. Drawing on the Voices in Durham case study, a multi-year community-based journalism project, and the co-design of a Social Impact Dashboard with community partners, this study explores how collaborative, real-world assignments serve educational and civic purposes. By integrating social theory, theory of change, and standpoint theory, the paper highlights how students’ ingrained dispositions shape their professional practices and how these are challenged through community engagement. The resulting dashboard prototype visualizes measurable outcomes such as increased civic participation, stronger community connections, and enhanced public trust, illustrating how experiential journalism education prepares students to be both skilled professionals and socially responsible citizens while exposing the limitations of current accountability metrics.

Keywords: audit culture, engaged journalism, social impact, journalism education, community-based learning, theory of change, institutional reciprocity

Résumé

Les programmes de journalisme canadiens sont confrontés à une contraction structurelle considérable, alimentée par les perturbations de l’industrie et l’essor de la culture de l’audit, soit un cadre où les outils de comptabilité financière sont utilisés pour mesurer le rendement dans des domaines non financiers (Shore & Wright, 2015). Dans ce contexte, les modèles d’évaluation conventionnels ne parviennent pas à saisir la véritable valeur civique de l’enseignement du journalisme. Le présent article contribue au corpus croissant de recherche sur le journalisme d’engagement en adoptant le langage de la culture de l’audit pour défendre les aspects intangibles et relationnels du journalisme. Il y parvient au moyen d’un cadre multidimensionnel conçu pour mesurer l’impact social. S’appuyant sur une étude de cas de Voices in Durham, un projet de journalisme communautaire s’étalant sur plusieurs années, et sur la co-conception d’un tableau de bord d’impact social avec des partenaires communautaires, la présente étude explore la manière dont de véritables projets collaboratifs contribuent à des objectifs éducatifs et civiques. En intégrant la théorie sociale, la théorie du changement et la théorie du point de vue, le présent article met en lumière la manière dont les dispositions inhérentes des étudiants façonnent leurs pratiques professionnelles et la manière dont celles-ci se trouvent remises en question par l’engagement communautaire. Le tableau de bord prototype qui en découle rend visible des résultats mesurables, comme l’augmentation de la participation civique, le renforcement des liens communautaires et l’amélioration de la confiance publique, illustrant par le fait même comment l’enseignement expérientiel du journalisme prépare les étudiants à devenir à la fois des professionnels compétents et des citoyens socialement responsables, tout en exposant les limites des données sur le rendement.

Mots-clés : culture de l’audit, journalisme d’engagement, impact social, enseignement du journalisme, apprentissage communautaire, théorie du changement, réciprocité institutionnelle

Beyond the audit: Institutional reciprocity and the social impact of engaged journalism

Teresa Goff

Introduction

The landscape of higher education in Canada is undergoing a significant transformation driven by shifting political and economic pressures (Axelrod, 2002) that demand quantifiable accountability (LaCroix, 2024). As Shore and Wright (2015) state: “The use of indicators, measurements, and rankings have become increasingly pervasive, both as instruments in the internal management of organizations and in the external representations of their quality, efficiency, and accountability to the wider public” (p. 421). The Ontario Ministry of Colleges and Universities underscored this shift in February 2024 by allocating $15 million to a new Efficiency and Accountability Fund. This signals the growing influence of “audit culture”—a regime that prizes quantifiable metrics over the complex, democratic purposes of education (Westheimer, 2018). Within this environment, colleges and universities are expected to fulfill a third mission, beyond teaching and research, to include meaningful reciprocal community engagement and societal contribution (Jongbloed et al., 2008). These expectations raise fundamental questions about the role of post-secondary institutions in fostering civic leadership, promoting civic engagement, and enhancing social cohesion (Westheimer, 2018). Ultimately, these competing expectations highlight the challenge for institutions to remain essential contributors to societal well-being amidst increasing corporatization in higher education (Brownlee, 2017). Central to resolving these competing pressures is the concept of institutional reciprocity, which requires a shift beyond participation and outreach and a move toward redefining how post-secondary institutions and communities co-create value in a time of standardized accountability. While the third mission rhetorically elevates civic contribution, existing assessment practices remain ill-equipped to evaluate the relational, long-term, and community-embedded outcomes through which such contributions are realized in practice. The emphasis on standardized performance indicators, such as enrolment numbers, completion rates, and labour-market alignment privileges forms of value that are readily quantifiable while marginalizing the qualitative and process-oriented dimensions of community engagement. As a result, programs that generate social and civic impact but do not align neatly with market-based metrics are vulnerable when it comes to audit-driven reviews like those conducted through Ontario’s three-year Efficiency and Accountability Fund. As Engvall (2010) argues, “The primary problem with ‘greater accountability’ through greater assessment lies in who determines who is doing that assessing, what standards should be used, and what judgements should be rendered after the assessment has been completed” (as cited in Lincoln, 2018, p. 3).

While audit culture is a systemic crisis being felt across the humanities, journalism education serves as a canary in the coal mine. Over the past decade, journalism programs across Canada have experienced sustained contraction, driven not only by industry disruption and funding pressures but also by assessment frameworks that fail to recognize journalism’s civic and democratic function. Some programs have been permanently shuttered, such as Cambrian College’s journalism program which closed in 2012 (Northern Ontario Business Staff, 2012) and Loyalist College’s photojournalism program, which had its final intake in 2023-2024 (Baldwin, 2023). The photojournalism program at Southern Alberta Institute of Technology (SAIT) was shuttered and absorbed into SAIT’s journalism program starting fall 2026 (Strasser, 2025). Others remain on the books but have suspended admissions, including Humber College’s Bachelor of Journalism program, paused in 2022 (David, 2022), amid declining enrolment, and Wilfrid Laurier University’s Honours BA in Digital Media & Journalism, which remains listed in the academic calendar despite halting intake in 2023-2024 (Wilfrid Laurier University, 2025) and Algonquin College, which saw its journalism diploma officially suspended for the Fall 2026 intake following a unanimous Board of Governors vote in March 2026 (Mcleod, 2026). A third category involves partial retrenchment, where institutions have reduced offerings while maintaining broader credentials. This includes Centennial College, which scaled back its journalism offerings in response to falling international student numbers (Creech, 2025); Fanshawe College paused its one-year Journalism–TV and Digital News certificate for 2024-2025 due to persistently low enrolment (Fry, 2024); SAIT suspended intake for the Radio, Television, and Broadcast News stream in Fall 2023, while continuing the broader diploma program (Mertz, 2023). Finally, several colleges have curtailed intake primarily for financial reasons, with Sheridan citing a 30% drop in enrolment and a $112-million budget shortfall (Bond, 2024), Mohawk College reducing admissions as part of a broader institutional restructuring, and Durham College, where the author teaches, deciding to suspend its journalism program intake effective Fall 2026 (Banerjee, 2025).

Importantly, these journalism program suspensions are unfolding alongside widespread restructuring across the Ontario college system. Since Fall 2024 more than 600 programs have been cancelled and multiple campus closures announced (Ontario Public Service Employees Union, 2025, p. 6). This scale of austerity reflects broader funding constraints, enrolment volatility, and policy pressures affecting post-secondary education. Within this context, journalism program closures appear less as anomalies and more as part of a systemic reconfiguration of applied media education. While the tension between public service mandates and market-driven metrics is acutely felt in the newsroom-classroom, it is precisely here that a path forward emerges. By reframing experiential learning, specifically engaged journalism, as a pedagogical vehicle for institutional reciprocity, we can begin to operationalize the civic and social value espoused in the third mission yet overlooked in conventional audits. In this frame, the experiential learning model moves past the traditional internship or field placement; hands-on learning becomes a space for co-creation where students’ education and the community’s need for connection and information needs are inextricably linked. Traditional assessment metrics fail to adequately capture the civic and social value of journalism programs because they prioritize enrolment, market readiness, and institutional efficiency. Under these conditions, program reviews are frequently reduced to technocratic assessments conducted by third-party consulting firms, prioritizing short-term institutional efficiency over the complex, long-term relational outcomes of experiential and community-based learning inherently practiced in journalism education.

Within this evaluative landscape, experiential learning sits in a paradoxical situation. On one hand, it is increasingly promoted to support readiness and strengthen institutional-community connections. On the other hand, its outcomes, specifically related to civic engagement, trust-building, and social cohesion, are difficult to quantify using conventional assessment tools. This may be because experiential learning programs vary in length, immersion, purpose, learning outcomes, and institutional involvement in design and assessment, yet they share the core belief that direct, guided experiences in real-world contexts produce powerful learning opportunities (Johnston & Sator, 2021). Experiential learning became a formal performance metric for Ontario universities in 2021, with a requirement for students to experience hands-on learning before graduation (LaCroix, 2024). As experiential learning becomes more central to institutional strategies for demonstrating relevance and accountability, the question of how to assess its broader social impact has become increasingly urgent. Social Impact Assessment, defined as the process of analyzing, monitoring and managing the intended and unintended social consequences of planned intervention, can help predict impact, recommend mitigation strategies, resolve conflicts, contribute to capacity building, and monitor programs to align interventions with community values and positively contribute to social well-being (Feor et al., 2023; Imperiale & Vanclay, 2023; Vanclay, 2003). However, as D’Antonio Maceiras et al. (2023) note, Social Impact Assessment tools tailored specifically to higher education remain underdeveloped. This gap is not unique to academia. While several professional frameworks have emerged to quantify the influence of reporting, such as the Impact Tracking Guide (Solutions Journalism Network & Fathm, 2022), which provides a hypothesis-driven process for newsrooms to track policy changes and community discourse, these tools are mainly designed for the professional industry, not the newsroom classroom. Furthermore, as noted by Tofel (2013) and Schiffrin et al. (2025), even these metrics have struggled to gain widespread adoption in newsrooms due to the inherent difficulty of isolating the direct causal effects of journalism on broad societal change. Tofel (2013) notes  much of this difficulty stems from a foundational problem: “impact” means different things across different kinds of journalism, and assuming one definition will suffice has generated significant confusion. While measuring a story’s impact on a mass audience is difficult, measuring the transformation of a student’s professional disposition and the strength of a co-designed community relationship offers a more proximate and manageable unit of analysis. In the “closed loop” of a journalism program, the data is not speculative; it is built into the reciprocal nature of the work. So, while professional impact may remain elusive, the educational setting provides a unique “lab” where the civic value of journalism can be documented through direct, qualitative feedback and student growth metrics. The journalism classroom is, in this sense, the right place for impact measurement. This is where the reciprocal relationship between institution and community is the curriculum, and its civic outcomes are co-produced through exactly the kind of structured, reflective engagement the third mission requires.

This paper proposes a Social Impact Dashboard prototype to document these civic values. Developed using the CSI Dashboard from Social Innovation Canada as part of the “Adopting Common Measures” initiative, this free, centralized platform serves as the primary tool for tracking, organizing, and visualizing impact metrics in this research. Specifically designed to support mission-driven organizations, it aligns activities with the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and facilitates comprehensive Social Impact Assessment. This framework has not been used for higher education purposes but offers a robust, community-centred solution to counter the narrow focus of neoliberal assessment models that prioritize efficiency and market readiness over civic outcomes. Central to this argument is the claim that experiential journalism education, when structured around reciprocal community partnerships, generates measurable social impacts that extend beyond student skill development, including increased civic engagement, stronger community connections, and enhanced public trust, all of which serve the third mission. It is important to distinguish this framework from traditional models of community journalism. While community journalism focuses on news sustainability and audience reach, I argue it is possible to leverage the third mission of engaged journalism to centre institutional reciprocity: the co-creation of civic value between post-secondary institutions and the communities they serve. This distinction matters because it reframes what audits should measure: not market outputs, but the relational, long-term outcomes through which the third mission is actually realized.  In this model, the post-secondary institution does not treat the community as a “vehicle” for experiential learning, nor does it position the community as a “market” for news consumption for student papers. Rather, this shift positions journalism education as a co-equal partner in community development. Unlike standard experiential learning, which prioritizes student skills development, this framework uses participatory co-design to ensure the journalism produced is a byproduct of a much deeper social intervention. By documenting this through a collaborative research lens, we can move toward the type of measurable Social Impact Assessment required by audit-driven environments.

This framework was developed through a collaborative research project using two case studies funded by Co-operative Education and Work-Integrated Learning (CEWIL) Canada’s iHub: the college-based Voices in Durham experiential learning project and a graduate-level Social Impact Measurement (SIM) project. Through participatory co-design with students and community partners, this research contributes to engaged journalism scholarship by proposing a multidimensional assessment framework grounded in social theory and standpoint theory, demonstrating, through the Voices in Durham case, how community-engaged journalism practice produces observable civic and social impact; and positioning journalism education not as a declining vocational pathway but as a vital form of democratic infrastructure that supports community well-being and contributes meaningfully to the third mission. Using Poepsel’s (2021) framework, engaged journalism projects are categorized based on the elements emphasized most in their descriptions, considering purpose, outcomes and resources. By this measure, Voices in Durham is primarily “facilitating conversation” since its main goal is bridging community members together, with content production a secondary outcome (Poepsel, 2021, p. 70).

By adopting a collaborative research approach that centres the perspectives of students, community partners, researchers, and end-users, this paper explicitly challenges the reductionist logic of audit-driven evaluation. As Smulyan (2020) states, “we do not do research about communities; we do research with communities and then present what we have learned together” (p. 131). Building on the understanding of impact as an emergent social practice, shaped by relational engagement and situated knowledge, the paper is structured as follows. Section I outlines the theoretical framework, drawing on social theory, theory of change (TOC), and standpoint theory to justify a participatory co-design approach to assessing the social impact of experiential journalism. Section II details the mixed-methods methodology underpinning the study, including the Voices in Durham and SIM case studies and the development of the Social Impact Dashboard. Section III presents the findings, focusing on points of convergence between educational and community logic models. Section IV discusses the implications of the Social Impact Dashboard for challenging audit-driven assessment and advancing engaged journalism scholarship.

SECTION I: THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK

For this research, I integrated social theory, theory of change, standpoint theory, and participatory co-design in a multidimensional theoretical framework to examine the social impact of experiential learning and journalism education. Together this foundation provides a lens for understanding how experiential learning operates within structured institutional context, how change is intentionally planned and evaluated, how power and positionality shape knowledge production, and how impact can be co-defined with communities rather than imposed through standardized metrics. This integration directly informs the study’s methodological choices and underpins the development of a participatory Social Impact Dashboard.

The overarching goal of this research is to develop a replicable model to assess the third mission of community-engaged experiential learning. While the third mission represents higher education’s commitment to social contribution beyond teaching and research, its success is dependent on community interactions. As a result, evaluating this mission necessitates a transition from administrative accounting toward a social theory of practice that accounts for the ways in which institutional mandates are translated into social change.

Experiential learning and social theory: Structure, agency, and practice

Experiential learning is known as a pedagogical approach that emphasizes learning through action, reflection, and engagement with real world contexts (Dewey, 1938; Kolb, 1984). In journalism education, it is exemplified by projects such as Voices in Durham, which often take the form of community reporting, live broadcast, collaborative storytelling, and partnerships with civic organizations. Research comparing traditional journalism instruction with courses grounded in community engagement, such as service learning and civic reporting, demonstrates that embedding community-based projects within journalism curriculum deepens students’ engagement with local issues, strengthens core reporting competencies, and bridges academic learning with community-identified needs (Cox, 2018). As Poepsel (2021) notes, “engaged journalism projects often have engaging a community in civic conversation as the primary goal and informing the audience as a close second” (p. 66). From a social theory perspective, experiential journalism projects such as Voices in Durham position students not merely as content producers but as participants within networks of practice that include community members, public institutions, and media organizations. While the pedagogical benefits of such approaches, particularly skills development and professional readiness, are well-documented, their broader social impacts are less frequently theorized or systematically measured. I argue these interactions shape both journalistic outputs and social relationships, producing outcomes such as trust building, civic engagement, and shifts in narrative power.

To this end, social theory provides a rigorous lens for examining experiential learning beyond individual skill acquisition by illustrating the relationship between structure, agency, and practice. Specifically, Bourdieu’s (1980/1990) concept of habitus illuminates how students’ ingrained dispositions shape their engagement with social structures and community contexts (Edgerton & Roberts, 2014). Habitus encompasses the cognitive frameworks and assumptions acquired through socialization, influencing how individuals perceive opportunities, set goals, and interact with hierarchical systems (Bourdieu, 1980/1990). In the context of the third mission, the structure is the institutional field, while agency is expressed through the student’s ability to navigate it using their own cognitive frameworks. In community-engaged learning, misalignments between students’ habitus and the realities of community engagement can prompt reflection, revealing the limits of prior assumptions and opening pathways for transformative learning. These moments of disjuncture encourage students to reconsider approaches to problem-solving, ethical responsibility, and social participation. Recognizing the interplay between habitus and structured social environments can illuminate both barriers and possibilities for civic engagement. It is these reflective moments that connect experiential learning to the third mission: when students move from self-oriented skill development toward an awareness of their responsibilities to the communities they serve, they are enacting the reciprocal civic contribution that post-secondary institutions are mandated but rarely equipped to measure.

Experiential learning holds that knowledge develops most effectively through direct experience, application in real-world contexts, and critical reflection (Adelman, 1993; Baker et al., 2005). Reflection enables students to analyze experiences, derive insights, and adapt practice, strengthening both professional skills and civic consciousness. This dual function is significant: reflection does not just consolidate learning; it is the mechanism through which students develop the civic orientations and social responsibilities that serve the third mission in practice. Rooted in the ideas of Jean Piaget, John Dewey, Kurt Lewin and Paulo Freire, experiential learning emphasizes an iterative cycle in which experience and reflection mutually reinforce one another and enable learners to connect theory to practice in meaningful ways (Adelman, 1993; Baker et al., 2005). In higher education, experiential learning is commonly enacted through community-service learning (CSL), community-based research (CBR), and other forms of community-campus engagement (CCE), which encompass interactive partnerships between faculty, students, and community organizations (Amon et al., 2020; Nelson & Stroink, 2020; Strand et al., 2003). These partnerships are not incidental to the third mission; they are its operational expression, transforming the rhetorical commitment to societal contribution into the measurable relational outcomes that engaged journalism education is uniquely positioned to practice. This understanding of engaged journalism as civic practice is grounded in a broader pedagogical tradition. CSL, a subset of experiential learning, is widely associated with positive student outcomes and civic development (Astin et al., 2000; Eyler et al., 2001). Bringle (2017) defines service-learning as the fusion of education and community service, while Gallop et al. (2023) build on this by framing CSL as a “pedagogy for citizenship” (Deeley, 2010; Mendel-Reyes, 1998, as cited in Gallop et al., 2023, p. 2) that connects academic learning with community well-being (see also Gemmel & Clayton, 2009). Experiential learning empowers participants to co-create meaning through collaborative engagement (Adelman, 1993; Gemmel & Clayton, 2009; Kolb 1984).

Within journalism education, this approach takes shape through community-engaged and solutions-oriented reporting practices, often referred to as engaged journalism (Poepsel, 2021). When students reflect on unfamiliar community contexts, their personal and professional growth is deepened, and they build the capacity to contribute meaningfully to social and civic outcomes. In this context, students learn not only journalistic skills but also civic responsibility, ethical accountability, and relational approaches to storytelling. By privileging reciprocity and co-creation, experiential learning positions communities as knowledge holders and collaborators rather than subjects. When they integrate reflective practice into experiential learning, journalism educators can support students in articulating how their experiences in engaged journalism challenge existing frameworks and foster new insights, reinforcing the broader goal of higher education’s third mission: cultivating civic-minded graduates capable of enacting positive social change within their communities.

Theory of change: Making the implicit explicit

While social theory helps identify the hidden dynamics of power and habitus, the theory of change (TOC) provides the roadmap that makes this visible. TOC is a practical tool that explicitly maps out these dynamics by providing a structured framework for linking activities in experiential learning projects (formalized in this study as work-integrated learning) to both short-term outputs and long-term societal outcomes (Klugman, 2011; Weiss, 1972).

In traditional journalism education, the theory of change is often assumed and rarely articulated. I argue that engaged journalism requires more intentionality. By mapping these causal connections, TOC enables students, educators, and community partners to clarify goals, monitor progress, and evaluate effectiveness in ways that go beyond simple completion metrics. Integrating stakeholder participation ensures the standpoints of those most affected by the project, students and community members, inform both the design and assessment of initiatives, enhancing relevance and equity. TOC facilitates intentional planning and reflection (Msila & Setlhako, 2013), making explicit how student learning and community collaboration contribute to civic engagement and social impact. By connecting practical activities to broader societal objectives, TOC operationalizes higher education’s third mission in a measurable, inclusive, and transparent way.

Standpoint theory and participatory co-design

To ensure this theory of change is not imposed from the top down, this research project uses standpoint theory, drawing on feminist and Indigenous scholarship to highlight how marginalized perspectives shape knowledge production and challenge assumptions embedded in traditional evaluation (Moreton-Robinson, 2013; Nakata, 2007). Applying this lens through a participatory co-design approach positions students and community members as co-authors in defining what constitutes meaningful impact. By centring lived experience, relational accountability, and community priorities, co-design ensures assessment reflects local values and addresses power imbalances. In the context of the Voices in Durham project, this approach informs the development of the Social Impact Dashboard. Rather than relying on efficiency-driven metrics that overlook nuanced social outcomes (D’Antonio Maceiras et al., 2023; Feor et al., 2023; Imperiale & Vanclay, 2023), the dashboard uses co-design indicators to measure civic and social outcomes in ways that are equitable, context-sensitive, and aligned with the community’s own definition of success.

Summary of framework

The combination of social theory, theory of change, standpoint theory, and participatory co-design forms a multidimensional approach to measuring the social impact of experiential learning in higher education. This approach accounts for structural dynamics (Bourdieu, 1980/1990), planned change (TOC), and power inequalities (standpoint theory), capturing the personal transformations students and community members undergo as they navigate the experiential learning process.

Section II: Methodology

I used a mixed-methods approach combining qualitative and participatory techniques to examine the social impact of experiential journalism education and develop a framework for assessing higher education’s third mission in practice. I structured the research around a multi-phase, iterative process, with each phase building on the previous one to refine tools and insights.

The primary aim was to develop a Social Impact Dashboard prototype capable of capturing both the tangible outcomes and the intangible shifts in habitus and agency inherent in community-engaged experiential learning. The methodology integrates principles from social theory, theory of change, and standpoint theory guiding methodological choices to emphasize relational engagement, reflexivity, and the standpoints of those most affected by the projects: students, community partners, and researchers. Research ethics approval was obtained through Durham College (REB Certificate Number: 282-2324).

The study focused on two complementary case studies: the college-based Voices in Durham experiential learning project and the graduate-level SIM project. Both projects were funded by CEWIL Canada’s iHub, which provides grant-based support for curricular work-integrated learning (WIL), allowing for applied community-engaged research in higher education settings. The SIM project provided the management framework used to define the indicators and logic models that underpinned the Voices in Durham study.^[1]

This research was grounded in a community of practice facilitated by Social Innovation Canada (Phase Three). While listed as a distinct phase, the training received on “Common Measures” and logic modelling provided the theory of change framework that informed the data collection and analysis across all subsequent phases. This training also led to the selection and use of the CSI Dashboard as the prototype for measuring the social impact of engaged journalism.

Phase One: Voices in Durham project (Fall 2023)

Stage: Case Study 1a
Focus: Project implementation

The research began with the Voices in Durham experiential learning project, which started as a collaborative experiential learning initiative between Durham College’s journalism program and the Region of Durham’s Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion division. The goal was to engage first-year students in reporting inclusive and community-centred stories while fostering professional skills and civic engagement. Activities included student-produced multimedia content, specifically video postcards, and a one-hour live radio broadcast informed by a Community Listening Event. During this phase, students engaged with panelists and community members, gaining practical reporting experience while exploring local social issues. This phase provided the “activity” and “output” data necessary for the subsequent research analysis.

Phase Two: Voices in Durham research study 1 (September 2023–April 2024)

Stage: Data collection 1a
Focus: Surveys and focus groups

Following the project launch, this phase focused on data collection and obtaining Research Ethics Board  approval to evaluate the student experience. Surveys were administered to students at multiple stages to capture their perceptions. Survey One (post-Community Listening Event, Fall 2023) collected 23 responses asking students to reflect on how the event influenced journalistic coverage and fostered belonging. Survey Two (post-live broadcast, Fall 2023) collected 22 responses focusing on whether participation fostered a sense of belonging for themselves in the community. To deepen this quantitative data, focus groups were conducted in April 2024. These discussions served a dual purpose: gathering qualitative data to evaluate student experiences and informing the development of the Social Impact Dashboard.

Discussions highlighted key outcomes of experiential learning including:

• empathy and emotional intelligence;
• civic engagement and community awareness;
• professional and personal development;
• resilience and adaptability; and,
• discipline-specific journalism skills.

Analysis of the surveys and focus groups informed the creation of logic models for Voices in Durham, visually mapping the relationships between activities, outputs, outcomes, and impacts. These logic models were used in Phase Four as training for graduate students. They then served as the foundation for the first iteration of the dashboard and guided the development of impact statements, which framed expected outcomes and associated indicators.

Phase Three: Tracking social impact/community of practice (September 2023–May 2024)

Stage: Researcher training
Focus: Adopting common measures

Running concurrently with the initial data collection, this phase established the methodological foundation for the dashboard. I participated in a community of practice run by Social Innovation Canada as part of the “Adopting Measures” initiative, a program which supports social purpose organizations in aligning activities with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals. It was through this initiative that I accessed the free CSI Impact Dashboard, developed by Social Innovation Canada. This platform serves as the prototype for what I develop throughout this study to operationalize the social impact of engaged journalism. Figure 1 illustrates the functional structure of the prototype, showing how the platform facilitates the mapping of qualitative journalistic outcomes onto quantitative UN SDG targets and ambitions. The module shown in Figure 1 was developed as part of the CEWIL iHub research project Voices in Durham in collaboration with Ontario Tech University graduate students Shaun McLeod, Joseph Young, and Aurazu Zahidi. The prototype was created using data collected from Voices in Durham surveys and focus groups.

Figure 1
“Impact and SDGs” module within the Social Impact Dashboard prototype

Sessions from September 2023 to May 2024 focused on logic models indicators and evaluation frameworks. This phase was critical for researcher training providing the specific tools to:

• articulate intended changes and impact goals;
• design logic models mapping activities to outcomes; and,
• identify quantitative and qualitative indicators of impact to populate the CSI Dashboard.

Phase Four: SIM project (April 2024–September 2024)

Stage: Case Study 2a
Focus: Logic models and dashboard v1

This phase expanded the research scope through the SIM project funded by CEWIL iHub. The project engaged five graduate students, including the author, to co-design impact dashboards with three community partners: Revitaled Reintegration Services, Their Opportunity, and Safety Network Durham. This phase focused on the process of measurement. Graduate students co-created logic models with community partners, mapping inputs, activities, outputs, and outcomes for each organization. Instead of using a standardized template, each student-partner team co-designed a distinct Social Impact Dashboard tailored to that organization’s specific mission, vision and values. This dashboard shown in Figure 2 was developed in collaboration between Riley Spigarelli (Executive Director, Safety Network Durham) and Darcy Piercey-Andrews (Graduate Student, Ontario Tech University).

Figure 2
Snapshot of a tailored dashboard block developed for Safety Network Durham

They applied organizational data to develop a tailor-made dashboard (Phase Four) for Safety Network Durham. Grounded in a theory of change approach, this process made explicit how community-engaged practices contribute to broader social well-being, resulting in the first iteration of the community dashboards.

The SIM project extended the Voices in Durham methodology to a community-driven Social Impact Assessment context. This phase demonstrated the transferability of logic models and dashboard frameworks across educational and community-based contexts, while providing practical experience and participatory co-design that reinforced theoretical insights into standpoint and social practice.

Phase Five: Social impact measurement dashboard Iteration Two (September 2024–December 2024)

Stage: CSI Dashboard (v2)
Focus: Refining partner tools

This phase refined impact statements and indicators in collaboration with the community partners using logic trees. This method ensured that the impact categories were organized clearly: they were distinct and did not overlap (mutually exclusive), while guaranteeing no important areas were missed (collectively exhaustive). Drawing on social practice theory, the dashboard model understands social impact as emerging from the recurring actions and relationships embedded in community life.

Phase Six: Voices in Durham Dashboard Iteration One (September 2024–December 2024)

Stage: Case Study 1b
Focus: Voices in Durham Dashboard (V1)

The final phase applied the refined logic models back to the Voices in Durham project itself, translating the student-centred experiential learning activities from Phases one and five into indicators aligned with engaged journalism outcomes. Student learning was understood as emerging through journalistic practice within community contexts. The resulting dashboard organizes data into impact statements derived from the logic models, such as meaningful community engagement cultivates unexpected connections, breaking barriers and fostering understanding through shared stories and open dialogue. Although full data collection was not completed within the study timeline, the shared methodological architecture ensures continuity and comparability with the SIM dashboard framework.

Ethics, validity and reliability

Research ethics approval was obtained through Durham College for all the Voices in Durham surveys and focus groups (Adil, 2024; Ficker, 2025; Kour, 2024; Nagare, 2024; Perez, 2024). Ethical considerations included participant consent, confidentiality, and the voluntary nature of participation. At the time of data collection, the author was on sabbatical and was not teaching or evaluating the students involved in the study, reducing the potential for perceived power imbalances or coercion. Validity was strengthened through triangulation of data sources: surveys, focus groups, and observational data. Reliability was enhanced through the iterative use of logic models and structured analysis frameworks, which allowed for consistent coding and categorization of qualitative data.

Integration and analysis

The Voices in Durham and SIM projects were analyzed in tandem to capture intersections between student learning outcomes and community impacts. Comparative analysis highlighted patterns and differences across cohorts, identifying how experiential learning fosters professional skills and career readiness, civic engagement and community awareness, interpersonal growth, empathy, and resilience. The resulting dashboard framework maps these outcomes across short-term, intermediate, and long-term indicators, providing both a practical tool for institutions and a theoretical model linking experiential learning to measurable social impact.

Summary

This mixed-methods participatory methodology integrates experiential learning theory, social theory, and standpoint theory with community-engaged and engaged journalism practices. By combining surveys, focus groups, logic models, and iterative dashboard development, the research provides an evidence-informed approach to assessing the social impact of higher education programs. The Voices in Durham and SIM case studies demonstrate the capacity of participatory, co-designed frameworks to capture nuanced, community-centred outcomes that conventional assessment metrics often overlook. Ultimately, the methodology establishes a replicable model for linking student learning, organizational impact, and societal contribution within the context of experiential journalism education.

SECTION III: FINDINGS

The findings suggest that experiential journalism education generates significant social capital and community impact. The data reveal a clear trajectory from student skill development to broader civic engagement, validated through the alignment of logic models and operationalized in the digital dashboard.

1. Shifting habitus: From student to civic actor

Qualitative and quantitative data from the Voices in Durham project suggest that community-engaged reporting triggers a shift in student habitus moving them from a primarily academic orientation to a civic identity. This shift represents a move away from the traditional, often more transactional model of journalism, where information is extracted from communities for external consumption and towards a relational model where reporting is collaborative and works to build long-term trust. In this study, the transition was observed in survey data from the Community Listening Event. For many first-year students, the experience fostered a sense of civic belonging, a key indicator of institutional reciprocity. Rather than merely completing an assignment, students described the event as a mechanism for navigating “imposter syndrome” and contextualizing their place within a complex social ecosystem. This shift became most evident as students realized that the hierarchy between journalists and sources is often artificial. As one student reflected:

It had definitely helped to give me more confidence to actually talk to people because at the beginning of this program I was so shy, but then after a while when I realized that all these people they’re just normal people, if you take away the title, I think it’s got to help me understand people a bit more. (Student 11)

Furthermore, focus groups provided the strongest evidence of how students’ existing ethical frameworks adapted through practice. In analyzing transcripts, a recurring theme was the students’ realization of their own agency in shaping the reputation of journalism. By engaging directly with the public, students consciously contrasted their collaborative approach with more extractive stereotypes of the field:

My story was about the power of journalism. They were talking about how some journalists can be like really rude or like kind of force them to say something…put into a different way than what they want it to be. So, I think by them bringing that up it shows that we have the power to change that. (Student 4)

This realization prompted a pivot from extractive journalism to relational journalism.  Another student noted that “it impacts our community better if we come across as nicer or less in their face about it,” articulating a clear shift toward a community-engaged ethic (Student 6).

2. The Civic Engagement Bridge: Aligning logic models (SIM & Voices in Durham)

A significant finding emerged at the intersection of the two case studies. The “Civic Engagement Bridge” was constructed through a specific methodological sequence that linked graduate-level theoretical training with the college-level experiential application described above. This was not merely a thematic overlap, but a methodological one, constructed through the specific training and co-design processes undertaken by the graduate students.

This engagement served two purposes: collaborating with community organizations to identify and refine key performance indicators (KPIs) of social impact, while simultaneously building graduate students’ capacity in logic model development and evaluation.

Figure 3
The Civic Engagement Logic Model

The subsequent analysis of the Voices in Durham transcripts validated these logic models across multiple dimensions. After analyzing the transcripts for the participants’ interpretations of how hands-on learning impacted them, strong evidence pointed to the importance of personal interactions, storytelling with community, and practical skills.

Students explicitly acknowledged their work’s potential for positively impacting the community with key themes overlapping directly with the community partners’ goals, including empathy, community engagement, diversity, and professional development.This broad thematic alignment laid the groundwork for testing specific KPIs. One salient overlapping KPI identified during this process was increased knowledge of diversity, equity, and inclusion.

The indicators in this dashboard (Figure 4) were developed using a bottom-up logic modeling process. Initial descriptive categories were refined through thematic analysis of student focus groups and longitudinal surveys, which provided the evidence base for the distinction between short-term (relational/educational) and long-term (systemic/civic) outcomes.

Figure 4
Social Impact Dashboard prototype showing the short-term outcome for diversity, equity and inclusion

The validity of the logic model was most powerfully confirmed by a Voices in Durham students’ experience with the Region of Durham’s pillar of inclusion and diversity. While the graduate students defined this outcome theoretically, the Voices in Durham journalism students provided the experiential evidence that validated it. This distinction matters because it points to something essential about journalism’s civic function: democratic participation depends not only on the circulation of information but on the cultivation of empathy, the dismantling of stereotypes, and the capacity to render visible those communities whose stories are routinely excluded from public discourse. Reflections from the Voices in Durham cohort revealed that discussions of diversity, equity, and inclusion were not abstract concepts but were realized through the sharing of communal stories. This practice functions as a form of inclusive knowledge production: by centring lived experiences, particularly those historically underrepresented or erased, students expand whose voices are heard (diversity), challenge dominant narratives and redistribute authority (equity), and create space for reciprocal dialogue between journalists and communities (inclusion). As one participant noted, students recognized that “global stories often have local connections” (Student 17), illustrating the interconnectedness of human experiences that sustains an informed and engaged public. This is the civic work that market-based assessments cannot capture, and exactly what a healthy democracy requires of its press.

This outcome was further validated when students encountered friction in the field. Students reported being surprised by the openness of community members, particularly those in intimidating professions like law enforcement. These encounters dismantled prior stereotypes, verifying the SIM outcome of “breaking barriers” and deepening the students’ appreciation for the complexity within their community. These types of encounters are not incidental to journalism education. Rather, they are the mechanism through which future journalists develop the civic literacy and relational accountability that responsible public interest reporting demands.

An international student, previously unfamiliar with Canadian Indigenous history, described the impact of an interview:

I have never known about the Indigenous people…So, after coming here and having the first event that we did was an interview with Priscilla … it was something that actually made me into another world kind of thing [sic], knowing that there was a whole community that suffered from oppression. (Student 8)

This reflection illustrates journalism education at its most democratically consequential. The student did not just get a story, they acquired a civic orientation, a recognition of historical injustice, and a responsibility to communities whose experiences demand accurate, empathetic representation. This is the civic labour experiential journalism education performs: it produces not only skilled practitioners but informed democratic participants capable of strengthening the social contract between the press and the public it serves.

This finding confirms the methodological success of the bridge: the Social Impact Assessment graduate students successfully identified necessary indicators (KPIs) through their training and collaboration, and the Voices in Durham journalism students provided the qualitative data proving those indicators were achieved in the field. Together, they demonstrate the civic utility of journalism education is not merely rhetorical, but rather measurable, relational, and essential to the democratic health of the communities the students will go on to serve. Critically, this civic value does not depend on professional destination. A student who never enters a newsroom but leaves with a dismantled stereotype, a recognition of historical injustice, or a deepened capacity for empathy has still been transformed into a more informed and empathetic citizen. In this sense, journalism education’s contribution to democracy is not contingent on career outcomes but is realized in civic orientations, relational sensibilities, and public responsibilities that students carry into their lives and communities. This is the kind of argument that audit culture cannot make and precisely the evidence a Social Impact Assessment can.

Figure 5
Dashboard interface tracking specific stakeholders (college students) against defined social impact metrics

3. Operationalizing impact: The Social Impact Dashboard prototype

The research culminated in the development of a Social Impact Dashboard prototype. This tool moves beyond static reporting to provide a visual framework for tracking these overlapping impacts identified in the student analysis. The dashboard organizes data into “impact statements” derived from the logic models, connecting broad goals to specific indicators. For example, the impact of “increased knowledge of DEI” is measured against Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) derived from student reflection and community feedback.

Figure 6
The Social Impact Dashboard interface, visualizing the alignment between Voices in Durham values, social impact objectives and community needs

By connecting broad goals to specific KPIs, such as “increased knowledge of DEI”, the framework translates qualitative student reflection and community feedback into measurable impact. This hierarchical structure categorizes community engagement as a primary focus with civic engagement and professional skills as secondary objectives. This alignment is rooted in the same four themes identified above: empathy, community engagement, diversity, and professional development.

Section IV: Discussion and implications for journalism education

The findings of this study carry implications that extend beyond the classroom. As evidenced by Ontario’s Efficiency and Accountability Fund and the wave of program suspensions documented in this paper, journalism education faces an existential threat from assessment regimes that equate “value” with financial efficiency or enrolment numbers. This research responds not by rejecting the demand for accountability but by redefining what counts as evidence. By operationalizing the third mission through a participatory Social Impact Dashboard, programs can meet the administrative demand for accountability while simultaneously defending the civic, relational, and democratic contributions that market-driven logic cannot see.

From civic actor to institutional asset: Implications of the habitus shift

The most significant and undertheorized finding of this study is the consistent shift in student habitus observed across the Voices in Durham cohort. When students moved from an academic orientation toward an active civic identity (recognizing the artificial hierarchy between journalist and source, dismantling prior stereotypes, and developing a relational rather than extractive approach to reporting), they were not simply becoming better journalists. They were enacting the third mission in practice. This transformation is significant precisely because it is measurable. Survey data, focus group transcripts, and student reflections all document this shift in observable, codable terms. If audit culture demands evidence, this is evidence: not of market readiness, but of the civic labour that journalism education performs and that a healthy democracy requires. Programs that can document this shift systematically are no longer vulnerable to assessments that only see enrolment numbers. This is where the third mission moves from rhetoric to evidence: when the habitus shift observed in individual students is connected to community-identified outcomes through a shared methodological framework, institutional reciprocity stops being an aspiration and becomes something measurable, replicable, and defensible.

The Civic Engagement Bridge as a replicable model

The methodological bridge between the Social Impact Assessment and Voices in Durham project is this study’s most practical and significant contribution. This bridge demonstrates that the civic outcomes of experiential learning in journalism education are not incidental or anecdotal but can be identified, tracked, and validated across two distinct contexts: graduate-level theoretical training and college-level experiential learning. The bridge separates two functions that are often collapsed in assessment practice: defining what impact should look like and verifying that it occurred. The SIM graduate students performed the first function, co-designing logic models and identifying KPIs in collaboration with community partners. The Durham College journalism students performed the second, providing qualitative evidence in the field that those indicators were being achieved. Neither project could have done this alone. Together, they produced something neither conventional program review nor standard experiential learning assessment typically generates: community-validated, student-evidenced proof of civic impact. This is what professional impact frameworks like the Impact Tracking Guide have struggled to achieve at scale, but in the closed loop of a journalism program, where students and community partners are active co-designers, the data can be built into the work itself. Any program with access to community partners and a willingness to co-design logic models can replicate this structure. The CSI Dashboard provides the shared platform, the UN SDGs the shared language, and the theory of change framework the methodological spine.

Figure 7
The Social Impact Dashboard interface, visualizing the alignment between Their Opportunity’s KPIs and metrics and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Figure 8
The Social Impact Dashboard interface, visualizing the alignment between Safety Network Durham’s client services and support metrics and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

Figure 9
The Social Impact Dashboard interface, visualizing the alignment between Voices in Durham’s program outcomes and student learning metrics and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals

The shared language of the UN SDGs is what makes this replication possible across partners with fundamentally different missions. Figures 7, 8 and 9 illustrate this portability. Where Their Opportunity mapped metrics rooted in poverty reduction and community health, Safety Network Durham mapped metrics rooted in health access and gender equity. Voices in Durham’s SDG alignment reveals the civic and economic dimensions embedded in a college media project—quality education, workplace skill development, and the amplification of marginalized voices. These are not outcomes that a conventional journalism program evaluation would typically surface. The SDG framework made them visible and comparable. The same structure and the same platform produced three entirely distinct impact profiles. This is what a shared language is designed to do: hold the difference within a common structure.

The Social Impact Dashboard as a defence strategy

The Social Impact Dashboard translates the civic outcomes documented across both case studies into the standardized, visualizable format that audit-driven environments require. In doing so, it does not capitulate to audit culture, rather subverts it. Using the language of metrics, KPIs, and standardized reporting, the Social Impact Dashboard makes visible the kinds of relational, civic, and democratic outcomes that market-based assessments cannot see. Enrolment and graduation rates are not irrelevant to this argument. Indeed, they remain the primary currency of institutional accountability, and a journalism program that cannot demonstrate stable or growing enrolment is already in a precarious position. But they are insufficient on their own, and in a time of declining print readership and trust in media, they are also increasingly vulnerable to interpretation. A program that graduates 50 students into a shrinking industry reads differently than one that graduates 50 students who have documented, community-validated civic impact. The dashboard does not replace the enrolment argument; it reframes it. Retention becomes evidence of student investment in meaningful work. Graduation becomes the completion of a civic formation process, not merely a credential transaction. This means that a program under review is no longer limited to citing enrolment or graduation rates but can also point to documented shifts in student habitus, validated community outcomes, and evidence of institutional reciprocity, all organized within a framework that speaks the administrative language of accountability. This is the strategic irony at the heart of the model: the same demand for quantifiable evidence that threatens journalism programs becomes, through the dashboard, the mechanism for their defence.

This matters beyond journalism education. As audit culture extends its reach across the humanities and applied programs more broadly, the question of how to document civic and relational value in institutional terms becomes increasingly urgent. The dashboard model developed here offers a transferrable framework for any program whose contribution to social well-being cannot be captured using conventional performance indicators. The infrastructure exists and the methodology is well-documented. What remains is the institutional will to redefine what counts as evidence, and the argument this study makes is that journalism education, with its unique capacity to co-produce civic value with communities, is the place to start.

Limitations: Data interoperability and scaling

The Social Impact Dashboard effectively converted the co-designed theory of change and logic models into a functional tool by translating the abstract goals of the “Civic Engagement Bridge” into a concrete system, but its reliance on categorization highlights the tension between data standardization and the messy reality of social impact. By requiring every piece of student content to be categorized against specific community needs and social impact objectives, the interface was able to move these concepts from static diagrams to a dynamic workflow, but the current CSI Dashboard prototype faces limitations in incorporating qualitative data, which is essential for capturing the nuance of social impact. Future iterations must address how to integrate narrative data (stories, testimonials) with quantitative metrics (surveys, KPIs) to create a truly holistic tool. The use of the UN SDGs as a “shared language” offers a pathway for this integration, allowing diverse projects to “triangulate” their data toward common global goals. Ultimately, aligning with the SDGs fosters institutional reciprocity and moves accountability away from “audit culture” toward shared objectives. The dashboard’s current limitations are not failures of the model but indicators of where the field’s methodological development must go next, particularly in building the qualitative infrastructure that would make the civic reframing of conventional metrics like enrolment and retention not just strategically compelling, but empirically complete.

Conclusion

This study documents the development of a multidimensional framework for measuring the social impact of experiential journalism education and offers a vocal counter-narrative to the efficiency-driven assessment models currently reshaping Canadian higher education. By synthesizing social theory, theory of change, and participatory co-design, and by centring the perspectives of students, community partners, and researchers rather than those of auditors and administrators, the research demonstrates how civic outcomes, often dismissed as intangible, can be mapped and measured with rigour. Standpoint theory is not incidental to this argument; it is methodologically foundational. The framework works precisely because it begins with the situated knowledge of those doing the civic work, not from the abstract performance indicators of those measuring it from the outside. This is what it means to make the third mission visible: not to translate civic value into market language, but to build an evaluative infrastructure that takes seriously where that value is produced.

The Voices in Durham case study, developed through CEWIL Canada’s iHub funding in partnership with Durham College journalism students, and three community organizations, provides empirical evidence that when engaged journalism education is assessed through this lens, it facilitates the kind of institutional reciprocity the third mission promises, where civic value is co-created through reciprocal exchange, transforming students from passive learners to civic actors and thereby rebuilding trust with marginalized communities. As institutions face the existential pressures of contracting enrolments and third-party assessments like the Efficiency and Accountability Fund, the Social Impact Dashboard prototype offers more than a pedagogical innovation. It offers a reframing of the metrics that administrators require. Enrolment figures and graduation rates do not disappear within this model; they are joined by documented shifts in student habitus, validated community outcomes, and evidence of civic co-production, all organized in a framework that speaks the administrative language of accountability. Programs do not have to choose defending their values over their numbers. The dashboard makes both arguments at once, and in so doing, transforms the third mission from a rhetorical commitment into a measurable institutional practice.

As audit culture extends its reach across the humanities and applied programs, the question of how to document civic and relational value in institutional terms becomes increasingly urgent. Cheit (1994) observed that “The issue now is not whether higher education needs to be made accountable, but whether the accountability movement itself can be made more accountable” (as cited in Lincoln, 2018, p. 3). This challenge remains unresolved three decades later and this study sees that challenge as a design problem. The answer proposed here begins in the closed loop of the journalism classroom where the data is not speculative but built into the reciprocal nature of the work itself. By adopting tools that make the third mission visible, post-secondary institutions move beyond a one-way model of outreach toward a collaborative exchange where the institution and the public co-define success. This shift demonstrates that institutional value is not determined by market metrics alone but is earned through mutual accountability to the communities they serve. Arguably, this is what the third mission has always meant and what audit culture has failed to see.

Engaged journalism education, when framed through this reciprocal lens, does more than prepare students to be skilled professionals. It shapes them into empathetic, civically oriented citizens who carry into their communities the capacity to strengthen the social contract between the press and the public it serves. Democratic infrastructure is not a metaphor here. It is a description of what the journalism classroom actually does when it is structured around reciprocal community partnerships: it builds the civic relationships, shared knowledge, and mutual accountability that democratic life requires.  If journalism education entered this paper as a canary in a coalmine, among the first casualties of audit culture’s failure to see civic value, it leaves as something else entirely: a model for what post-secondary education looks like when institutions actually do what they say they want to do, producing graduates who contribute meaningfully to the reciprocal community engagement and societal contribution the third mission promises. The journalism classroom is not a vocational training ground but democratic infrastructure, a place where civic values, reciprocal relationships, and community accountability converge to produce something the third mission has always promised but never known how to measure. Until now.

Teresa Goff is an educator, writer and researcher specializing in experiential learning, social impact assessment, and community-driven storytelling. A faculty member in Durham College’s Journalism–Mass Media program since 2014, she bridges media, education, and social innovation. Email: Teresa.Goff@durhamcollege.ca

Acknowledgements
This paper evolved from research originally conducted for a Major Research Paper (MRP) at Ontario Tech University. I am profoundly grateful to my supervisors, Dr. Alyson King and Dr. Gary Genosko, as well as Dr. Pariss Garramone, for their guidance and expertise. I am grateful to the organizers of the Engaged Journalism Conference, where the core ideas for this work were first sparked. I also appreciate the shared commitment to social purpose work provided by the Centre for Social Innovation (CSI) and Colleen McKay at Durham College’s Social Impact Hub. Finally, my thanks to Danielle Harder and Brian Legree, both of whom taught me more about engaged journalism than decades in the industry.

Disclaimers
During the preparation of this work, the author utilized generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools to assist in various stages of the research and manuscript development process as follows:

• Transcription: ChatGPT (OpenAI) were employed to assist in the transcription of audio recordings into text. All outputs were manually reviewed and verified against original recordings for accuracy.
• Thematic Analysis: ChatGPT (OpenAI) was utilized as a secondary tool to identify and categorize recurring themes within the qualitative data collected from student focus groups. The final thematic framework was validated and refined by the researchers to ensure alignment with the raw data.
• Structural and Content Refinement: Claude (Anthropic) was used to review the manuscript to identify logical gaps and redundancies in the prose.

Human Oversight: The author reviewed and edited the content as needed and takes full responsibility for the final content of the publication. The use of these tools did not replace the researchers’ critical analysis or the interpretation of the findings.

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^[1]   The study did not include surveys with the community groups. As part of the CEWIL iHub-funded project, two graduate students were assigned to each of the three organizations and worked with them directly to build the dashboards. We have permission to name the organizations, and the original masters research project has been published through the library of Ontario Tech University.