Asya Savelyeva and Naomi Maldonado-Rodriguez share their experiences working with Hikma Collective through UBC’s Arts Amplifier program.

Introduction

Arts Amplifier is a professional development initiative at the University of British Columbia, which helps UBC Arts Faculty graduate and postdoctoral students put their skills into action. Students are paired with local organizations for work terms designed to advance their professional development, while simultaneously providing those organizations with the students’ skills. 

In the summer of 2024, we — Asya Savelyeva and Naomi Maldonado-Rodriguez, UBC graduate students — joined Hikma Collective, a Vancouver-based startup providing tailored consulting services to scholars and social sector leaders. Asya is a Master’s student in the department of Anthropology, studying transnationalism and belonging experiences of Ukrainian asylum seekers displaced by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. Naomi is a PhD Candidate in the School of Kinesiology, examining the healthcare experiences of migrant women living with HIV from an intersectional perspective. We were warmly welcomed by Hikma’s core team, Dr. Erica Machulak (Founder and Lead Instructor), Dr. Ai Mizuta (Business Operations Manager), and Heidi Rennert (Grant Development Specialist). As they explained, our work with Hikma would involve a wide variety of activities, including both academic and non-academic writing, literature review, knowledge translation, and course development. 

At the end of our first work term, we were invited to extend our time at Hikma for another term, as additional funding opportunities were made available through the Arts Amplifier. We were very happy to continue our work with Hikma and immediately accepted the offer. This extended our work with Hikma to six months, which were filled with a variety of opportunities that allowed us to grow, develop, and apply our skills.

Our Time at Hikma

During the first work term of our project we focused on working with Dr. Andrea Webb, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Curriculum and Pedagogy at UBC, on her upcoming paper. We conducted literature reviews on the concepts of Professional Agency and Communities of Practice to update the paper’s bibliography. Afterwards, we wrote two posts for Hikma’s blog, consolidating what we learned about both topics. By the time the blog posts were finished, we had the opportunity to provide a round of feedback and edits to the paper manuscript. We used what we learned about professional agency and communities of practice, as well as approached the task with a general editing mindset. Alongside the annotated bibliographies, the blog posts, and the manuscript, we created an infographic highlighting the main points of the paper. Throughout this time, we also created social media content for various Hikma material, such as others’ blog posts and podcasts, and took turns with the rest of the team to facilitate weekly team meetings. Both of these tasks would continue into the second term. 

In collaboration with the team, we decided to focus our second term on Hikma’s many activities surrounding knowledge translation and mobilization. Most of our work during this term focused on supporting the development of a course entitled Research Impact with the UN Sustainable Development Goals. This course will be delivered in collaboration with CIFAL Victoria and the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) in the near future. More specifically, we were tasked with expanding the course content on the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals and on knowledge mobilization frameworks. We first conducted research on the history of the Sustainable Development Goals to provide key context for the course. We also completed an annotated bibliography on various knowledge mobilization frameworks with the aim of providing a wide breadth of frameworks that would resonate with individuals from different disciplinary backgrounds and expertise. Our literature reviews were then translated into course content, including powerpoint slides, in-class activities, and take home activities. Alongside our work on the CIFAL-UNITAR course, we also created templates for knowledge translation materials to be shared on social media. In total, we designed three different templates for Hikma’s branding strategy and created twelve social media posts to share about Hikma’s recent activities and projects.

Skills and Learnings

Over the course of six months with Hikma, we worked on many different projects. Balancing all of these things aligned well with Hikma’s day-to-day schedule, as the whole team constantly balances working with several clients all the while writing books, producing podcasts, generating blog posts, and maintaining regular social media content. Everyone at Hikma wears many hats and the team works to support each other and ensure that the startup is growing and flourishing. We eagerly joined the mix of initiatives, the variety of which allowed us to explore and develop our skills and try out new things.

While working with Dr. Andrea Webb, we conducted literature reviews on subjects we had not been very familiar with and worked collaboratively on her paper. Orienting ourselves in an unfamiliar subject matter taught us to quickly pick up on main themes and identify key literature pieces. Contributing to the paper manuscript in a collaborative way reinforced the importance of listening to others and providing constructive feedback. Taking turns to facilitate team meetings was an interesting challenge. At Hikma, team meetings are facilitated by team members who rotate every week. Being welcomed into this dynamic felt really nice, as it signalled to us that our presence was valued and that we were a core part of the team. 

We also had the opportunity to engage deeply within non-academic writing. As graduate students, we were well-acquainted with academic writing, however translating academic literature into concise and engaging material for Hikma’s blog, social media, and course content was a new experience. Learning how to create engaging knowledge translation materials taught us how to frame concepts and issues in ways that will resonate with and/or ‘hook’ readers and, most importantly, taught us how to effectively summarize information while retaining its nuance. Similarly, through engaging in the knowledge translation side of Hikma’s work, we also had the opportunity to work on Hikma’s branding strategy. We learned that building a cohesive and recognizable brand or image is first and foremost about building trust with one’s audience and communicating one’s values and underlying commitments. Being part of a large academic institution, it is sometimes easy to take for granted our positionality when we share information. However, this experience also reminded us that building trust and relationships, whether virtually or in-person, is an essential aspect of all scholarly work. 

Conclusion

We are both very grateful to have had the opportunity to join the Hikma Collective for these six months and to work on such a wide variety of projects. We had the pleasure of collaborating with an amazing group of people and developing our research, writing, and knowledge mobilization skills. Translating knowledge through different contexts provided us with immensely valuable experience that is hard to come by in academia. We were also able to have a look behind the curtain of the bridging work that Hikma does between the academic sector and the social sector. As we strive to build these bridges in our own work, with Ukrainian asylum seekers and migrant women living with HIV, and in academia in general, seeing Hikma’s process was incredibly insightful, and we intend to take what we learned here along on our own journeys. 

About the Authors

Asya Savelyeva is pursuing a Master of Arts degree in Socio-Cultural Anthropology at The University of British Columbia (UBC). She has a Bachelor of Arts degree from UBC in Sociology and English Literature. Her MA Thesis research focuses on transnationalism and belonging experiences of Ukrainian newcomers in Vancouver displaced by Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine. 

Naomi Maldonado-Rodriguez is a research assistant with Hikma and community-based health scholar completing a PhD at the University of British Columbia, where she focuses on migrant women living with HIV and their experiences accessing and engaging the healthcare system.