This website stores cookies on your computer. These cookies are used to collect information about how you interact with our website and allow us to remember your browser. We use this information to improve and customize your browsing experience, for analytics and metrics about our visitors both on this website and other media, and for marketing purposes. By using this website, you accept and agree to be bound by UVic’s Terms of Use and Protection of Privacy Policy.  If you do not agree to the above, you can configure your browser’s setting to “do not track.”

Skip to main content
People Departments Maps Buildings Rooms A-Z
University
of Victoria
Apply Library
Sign in Online tools Sign out
Faculty of Graduate Studies

Vincent E. Tom

  • BA (Simon Fraser University, 2012)

Notice of the Final Oral Examination for the Degree of Master of Arts

Topic

Leveraging Local Wisdom: The Role of Community Knowledge in the Strategic Direction of BC’s Community Foundations

School of Public Administration

Date & location

  • Wednesday, May 20, 2026

  • 11:00 A.M.

  • Virtual Defence

Reviewers

Supervisory Committee

  • Dr. Susanne Thiessen, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria (Supervisor)

  • Dr. Jill Anne Chouinard, School of Public Administration, UVic (Member) 

External Examiner

  • Dr. Crystal Tremblay, Department of Geography, University of Victoria 

Chair of Oral Examination

  • Dr. Amy Verdun, Department of Political Science, UVic 

Abstract

Community foundations (CFs) in British Columbia are uniquely positioned as place-based philanthropic institutions whose mandates depend on their ability to understand and act on community knowledge (CK). Yet how senior CF leaders conceptualize CK, access it, and mobilize it through organizational decision-making structures remains under-researched in the Canadian philanthropic literature. Using a constructivist grounded theory methodology, this study conducted ten semi-structured interviews with senior leaders across established BCCFs to examine how CK informs strategic direction and decision making. The analysis of these interviews produced five categories describing CK’s movement through the CK: cultivating informal access, managing multiple knowledge systems, navigating board dynamics, asserting strategic agency, and returning knowledge through reciprocity. Bringing together these categories supports an emerging theory, the Stewardship of Relational Knowledge, which articulates CK mobilization as a cyclical, non-linear process of stewardship conditioned by institutional power. The study concludes that a CF’s legitimacy as a community actor is not granted by its endowment size or grant programs but earned through its stewardship of the knowledge entrusted to it by the community. 

Keywords: community knowledge mobilization; community foundations; community philanthropy; philanthropic decision-making; philanthropic institutions; British Columbia

Back to oral exams