Information Letter
You are invited to participate in a study on mapping social innovation in New Brunswick. As an important member of the social innovation sector, your perspectives are vital to understanding how best to support and grow social innovation in the province. This document aims to provide enough information about this study for you to make an informed decision about whether or not to participate. A copy of this document will be provided to you before your participation.
Purpose of Study: This study seeks to map the social innovation ecosystem in New Brunswick, including social enterprises, cooperatives, community-based projects, and support organizations and resources. The research team consists of Brennan Lowery, Geoffrey McCormack, Shamy Rukokora and Rémi Reardon (St. Thomas University), Julia Fursova (University of New Brunswick), and Claire Kelly and Phuong Anh Tran (The Community Incubator). We are conducting a social network analysis to identify the key social innovation actors and support organizations in New Brunswick, including their geographic distribution, relationships between them, and identify gaps in collaboration between social innovation actors and how the sector can collectively overcome these gaps. We also seek to understand how social innovators access funding, resources, and expertise, as well as how existing support services can better enable social innovators in launching and growing social innovation initiatives. Taking an engaged research approach, we are guided by the following questions from the perspective of an emerging or established social innovator:
  1. How do I get started with my social innovation project?
  2. How can I network with other social innovators in my community or sector?
  3. How can I collaborate with other social innovators and support organizations?
  4. What expertise or resources do I need to succeed at creating social impact?
Your Involvement: We ask for your participation in an online survey hosted on the SurveyMonkey platform. You may also participate at a later date in an online focus group, for which we will contact you separately. Your participation in this study is entirely voluntary and you are free to participate in one part of the study but not another. If you choose to participate in the survey, it should take 20-30 minutes to complete.
Protecting Privacy and Confidentiality: We will make every effort to protect your anonymity and the confidentiality of information you share. The survey will ask for any organizations with which you are affiliated for the social network analysis, which will not be shared publicly. If you give an open-ended response that includes identifiable information (e.g. your name), we will remove it unless you give explicit permission for us to retain it. Confidentiality is limited by the nature of focus groups (see Benefits and Risks section).
Data Storage and Security: After data collection, only members of the research team will have access to the focus group recordings, survey responses, and transcripts. These files will be stored in a secure Microsoft OneDrive folder to which only these individuals (see Purpose of Study above) will have access.
How Your Knowledge Will Be Used: Your perspectives will inform the creation of a community report which will be shared with all participants in the study and other members of the New Brunswick social innovation sector. Highlights of the report will be shared in a presentation which will be shared at venues like academic conferences and presentations to stakeholders such as policymakers. A website will be created that shows a live map of the social network analysis, and short summaries of the findings may be published on the websites of partner organizations like the Pond-Deshpande Centre. An academic journal article will also be prepared for publication. Most research findings will be presented in aggregate form (i.e. not using individual quotes or perspectives), but we will ask to include some quotes with participant permission. If we would like to quote something you said, we will reach out to you with the quote and identify the research output in which we would like to include it. You will have the right to decline use of the quote or amend the quote’s wording. You may also choose whether or not the quote can be attributed to you.
Risks and Benefits: Participation in this study does not involve any physical risks. If there are any questions you do not wish to answer, you may skip them. There is no penalty for this.

Participating in this study will help create a better understanding of the social innovation ecosystem in New Brunswick and help inform policy to strengthen the sector. For example, an advisory committee has recently been created through the Economic and Social Inclusion Corporation to strengthen the non-profit sector and develop a provincial social enterprise strategy. This study seeks to inform these efforts by shedding light on the nature of the province’s social innovation ecosystem and identifying gaps in support and collaboration. Your participation would help ensure that as many perspectives as possible inform the research findings and recommendations made to policy audiences for strengthening the social innovation sector.
Withdrawal from the Study: Your participation in this study is voluntary and you have the right to stop participating at any point in the process or decline to answer any question asked. By giving consent to participate, you do not give up the ability to withdraw later. If you choose to participate in the online focus group, we will give a brief presentation outlining the study objectives and methods, and you will be able to leave before the focus group begins.


Should you choose to complete part of the survey and stop midway, and would still like your responses to be recorded, please click "submit" at the bottom of the page. In this situation, the research team will use your responses as submitted. If you do not wish for your responses to be recorded, simply close the survey and do not press "submit".

You may also choose to withdraw after data collection is complete, and request that information you shared be discarded. If so, your survey response will be deleted. If you would like to withdraw from the study, please contact us by August 31st, 2026. After that date, it will be very difficult to remove your survey response because they will be anonymized and possibly included in the community report or other outputs.
Questions: If you have any questions about the study, please contact the principal investigator, Brennan Lowery, at blowery@stu.ca or 709-986-6043. Should you have additional concerns about the ethical practice of research in this study, please contact the Chair of the St. Thomas University Research Ethics Board, Dr. Clive Baldwin, at baldwin@stu.ca.
 
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