Wednesday, November 17, 2010
Cassandra's blog has moved!
Wednesday, June 23, 2010
The Art of Participatory Leadership
Wednesday, April 28, 2010
Community-Campus Partnership for Health Conference!
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Systems Failure
I recently had the pleasure of meeting the women and girls of the Young Women's Empowerment Project. YWEP is made up of women and girls ages 12-23 who are involved in the Chicago sex trade and street economies, either willingly or unwillingly. They have been around six or seven years and have clearly spent a lot of time and energy thinking about how to build an organization that can be an asset to women and girls in their community.
Their Motto: Girls do what they have to do to survive.
Website: www.youarepriceless.org
Values: Self-care, empowerment, harm reduction, social justice, and popular education.
Not coincidentally, these well -chosen values would work well to guide a community academic partnership.
YWEP’s research was conducted over the course of a couple of years with design help from adult allies. (Scientists). They were able to reach 205 women and girls with a combination of street surveys, interviews, and focus groups. About half of the women and girls in the YWEP study were mothers or pregnant at the time of the research.
One of their research findings was that individual violence was magnified by individual violence. The individual violence was from family, pimps, johns, other community members. The institutional violence came from systems designed to help and protect their community. The criminal justice, child welfare, the hospital/public health systems, and other social services. They gathered many stories. Stories of girls being abused in foster care, then having their babies taken away from them and put back into that same abusive system. Stories of police demanding sex in order to let girls go and then arresting them anyway. Stories of hospital workers turning away girls because they admitted to being in the sex trade or because they were transgender or queer.
After conducting this research, YWEP concluded that they should continue to work on resistance to oppression and resiliance in their community without engaging the systems that were failing them. I have a lot of respect for these strong, intellegent, resiliant girls, and when they tell me that their resources are better spent working in their own community than on the systems surrounding it, I respect that decision. Although I did offer to help them work on system-level change any time they feel ready to do that.
The total rejection of systems seems a bit extreme, but the reality is that right now in America there are so many systems that are failing the communities they serve, and many individuals who are turning their backs on those systems - some practicing resilience and resistance like the YWEP girls and some simply hopeless. These system failures are expensive, tragic, and unjust. So let’s think about how community-academic partnerships can combine evidence-based policy with organized constituencies to effect changes in those systems.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Insights from the ICU
Saturday, November 14, 2009
Clarifying Community Engaged Research
This is a great articulation of the evolving field of community-engaged research. It is very useful for those approaching partners to understand which type of partnership they want. It is also a great way to reflect upon existing partnerships. Do all the partners you work with have clarity about where your partnership lies on this spectrum? If not, why not?
A couple of points:
1) If you want to do community-driven research, it is critical that the community control the money involved. So funders, interested in promoting community-driven solutions, should look at models that fund CBOs directly, with academic partners serving a consultancy role.
2) Dr. Kimmel also mentioned that communities can readily do policy work without the need to conduct original research. As readers of this blog, or attendees of any of my workshops know. I agree with this point. Community-driven and community-based research should serve the interests of the community, therefore they should be designed to answer questions that can lead directly to changes (often targeting the systems level) that will improve health and well-being.
Shawn Kimmel is the Founding Director of the Center for Community Driven Policy in Detroit. I very much look forward to his future work and insights.