Since 2017, I have been the Principal Investigator on a Partnership Development Grant funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. The partnership is between the School of Kinesiology and viaSport British Columbia, the lead agency in the province tasked with administering the  government’s sport investment. Together, we have undertaken a piece of work we call Level the Field: Disability Inclusion in Sport. We had two objectives. First, we wanted to gain understanding and make recommendations on what is required to make the British Columbia sport sector more inclusive of persons with disabilities. Second, we wanted to gain understanding and make recommendations on how to engage in partnerships between academic and the sport sector. I would like to share what we have learned about the second objective, ‘doing partnership,’ in the hope that it will be useful to you in deciding when to pursue partnerships, who to partner with and how to create strong partnerships.

1. Build relationships first, research second: It can be tempting, particularly as an Early Career Researcher trying to get your research program going, to want to ‘dive in.’ But finding the right partner takes time. Work first on building your relationships with potential partners — find the individuals and organizations that share your interests and your values. Ask ‘will I enjoy working with X for the next 3 years?’ If you can answer yes, then it is time to start thinking about the research you might do together. If you are not sure, keep the connection, but find another partner.                 

2. Time is a social construct: One of the greatest learnings we have had from our academic/sport sector partnership is that time runs differently for everyone. How we experience time has a lot to do with the ‘other stuff’ going on in our lives. For example, for the postdoctoral researchers on the team, this project was their ‘full time job’ — they were spending more hours on it every single day than the rest of us spent in a week. For the partners at viaSport, this project was one item in their portfolio and their ability to engage would wax and wane contingent on other priorities. As a new mother, I was just figuring out how to fit my teaching and research into the hours between daycare drop off and pickup. We had to learn how to ‘come together in time’ — sometimes that meant holding off on meetings until everyone had found time to prepare. Other times it meant giving a team member ‘ownership’ of a task so that they could advance the project on their own. At all times, it meant having honest conversations about what time everyone had for the work. I found the concept of ‘crip time’ and the work of disability artists and dance communities very helpful in theorizing how non- normative understandings of time can make time something flexible that ‘bends’ to make the meeting of minds and bodies possible [see for example].                                                                                        

3. Partnerships move at the speed of trust: Even the best planned project will encounter roadblocks. There will be disagreements amongst team members about how to proceed. You will learn new things, develop new understandings, or encounter new academic literature and all of this will change how you approach the work or what you wish to do. A strong partnership is resilient in the face of challenges and comfortable with uncertainty. Early on in our partnership, one of the team members said ‘partnerships move at the speed of trust.’ Every time we faced a difficult situation, we would ask each other ‘Do you still trust that we want the same thing? Do you trust that we have shared values and are committed to the common goal of a more inclusive sport sector?’ Once we had that confirmation, we would say ‘then we are going to have to find a way through this’ and we would move forward together.