Building Community via Research: Mapping the Field of Homelessness

Kerry Rempel is a PhD candidate at UBC-Okanagan and currently holds the position of Director of Applied Research at Okanagan College. Her roles a have included Business Professor, Department Chair, and Associate Dean. Alongside her academic positions, Kerry has worked with nonprofits and the social serving sector for 20 years as a consultant supporting strategic and operational change initiatives.

Over the last 10 years, Kerry has slowly built her research practice to support innovation in the social serving sector. This resulted in several published case studies focusing on social entrepreneurship and more recently on addressing homelessness through community actions. She has co-developed housing maps, created guidance and toolkits on incorporating lived-experience voices and worked to understand the interdependencies of entities addressing homelessness. Her experiences working in the sector helped her understand the power of community engaged research and she unashamedly pushes for more researchers to join her.