What community-based research can look like through a community-centric lens

By Rudayna Bahubeshi, Principal Strategist at Evenings and Weekends Consulting

Community-centric engagement is not a one-off endeavor, but a partnership, where communities are engaged in decisions, reported back to, engaged for feedback and iteration, and able to meaningfully influence direction-setting. 

We often hear organizations talk about equitable and inclusive community engagement, but what does it really mean for the initiation, the process, and the outcome? 

The sector is increasingly aware of the risks of consultation fatigue – the frustration created when communities are asked ad nauseam for their perspectives – but never experience meaningful dialogue or see the results of consultations. Not only is repeated ad-hoc engagement redundant and ineffective, it also fractures trust and fails to recognize what we already know, falling short of respecting community time. 

In 2013, a coalition of researchers in The Jane Finch Community Research Partnership (JFCRP) wrote in the Connecting The Dots report that academics studying the neighbourhood “treat community members as ‘data points’” and “often asked objectifying questions based on preconceived notions of the community.” Community members were left feeling “over-researched, over-analyzed, and objectified” by their engagement with institutions and individual researchers.

We know a different approach is required.

The Arctic Institute for Community-Based Research highlights that the community must be involved at every stage and in all decision-making. So, how do we engage equitably while avoiding objectification?

At Evenings and Weekends Consulting – an organization focused on supporting the impact of nonprofits, charities, and grassroots groups to advance equity and social justice – we’ve been rethinking what community-based research can look like through a community-centric lens. 

The basics of community-centric community-based research

The vast majority of our projects incorporate a listening campaign – a multi-pronged engagement strategy that includes surveys, house meetings (group conversations), and one-on-one interviews. It is built on the recognition that a “for us, by us” approach that centres and holds itself accountable to community is not only integral to challenging colonial top-down approaches, but the only pathway to success. 

Communities are the experts in their realities.

Too frequently, community engagement is a task rather than the anchor informing the entire initiative. We have all observed such processes, or worse, have personally experienced being tokenized and treated as a representative, as though our communities are monoliths. 

A colleague recently told me of a process they observed of a community health centre that developed a youth advisory table without meaningfully planning how to engage with intention and purpose, and instead treating the creation of the advisory committee as an end in itself. Decisions were brought to this table for a stamp of approval rather than a conversation. 

My colleague described the organization’s rebranding process in which the organization selected a name that took the youth advisory committee by surprise once they were informed of the decision, because while all the young people understood an unfortunate double meaning of the new name, filled with innuendo, it was not caught by the staff and leadership who were mostly more senior in age. There were also missed opportunities to meaningfully learn from the youth about enhancing access and quality of health services. And while the previous example is humorous, the consequences of seeking approval on baked ideas can much more often be deeply insidious, wasting critical resources and opportunities to meet urgently, long-ignored community needs.  

Helicoptering in to have difficult conversations and exiting just as quickly, particularly when the subject is related to urgent gaps in social and health needs, can also create and exacerbate distress. Community-centric engagement requires a trauma-informed lens that recognizes and mitigates the harms of the power dynamics at play.

All too often, communities never see the results of their contributions. A community-centric approach necessitates clarifying mechanisms for follow-up, accountability, how insights will be used, and how community expertise will be honoured, including compensation. 

But while paying people for their time, labour, and expertise is a good start, it’s not where the listening begins. There are many considerations to be had throughout the process.

Initiating with meaningful community outreach

There are many barriers to community engagement that begin with considering how people are made aware of these opportunities. Such barriers include engagements limited to certain times of the day, failing to consider 9-5 schedules or evening shift work; options only in-person, especially in areas not well-served by public transportation; making access invitation only to the “usual suspects”; and formatting engagements in ways that assume constituencies have preexisting knowledge of the organization or other contextual information, as opposed to inviting communities to an engagement that prioritizes what they deem important. 

Overcoming barriers may look like public callouts on digital channels for broad engagement to answer questions, using plain language, versions in different languages, representative imagery, and more. 

Sometimes, it looks like working directly with partners offline. Community partners can put up posters and use word of mouth and other channels to ensure targeted outreach to community members who may have intimate experience and knowledge of particular programs and services.

And frequently it looks like a combination of these approaches. 

It is important these engagements include people who live at the intersections of multiple identities and who are experiencing compounding barriers, as these groups are among the populations systems are failing most. 

This requires working with the partner organization that has built relationships with the community you seek to engage in to understand what might be most effective. For example, perhaps it looks like an in-person engagement led by a member of the community able to bring a locally-informed lens and designing for more accessible engagement with supports such as childcare.  

For many communities, chances are that any given consultation is not the first one they or others in their community have taken part in. And yet those doing the consulting are still likely to turn up in their communities without having sought out preexisting data or information. 

It engenders greater trust to ask smart, informed questions rooted in the distinct context and to demonstrate commitment rather than just espousing it. Consider challenges the community has raised in the past and show up prepared to state what you’ve done or what you plan to do to respond. 

This is not about coming to a community with those baked ideas for programs or services that would make the outreach superfluous. It’s about recognizing that it’s irresponsible for your organization’s first step in thinking about oppression, racism, or community needs to be community outreach. When we defer action on readily available information by saying more engagement is needed, it can be a delay tactic.

Setting intentions with the community throughout the process

While it’s important to be bold and imaginative in possibilities, it’s also valuable to frame conversations with clarity on expectations. For example, if there is a funding limit for the program that you are seeking to design, share that. 

Invite big ideas, be prepared to stretch to meet them, but set expectations so communities aren’t led into a conversation where they share wonderful ideas your organization may already know they are not positioned to execute. This risks leaving people feeling ignored if they don’t see any of their ideas reflected in final decisions (which they should also be engaged in). 

It is crucial to enter conversations ready to be responsive to unexpected needs and recommendations. Rich opportunities surface when organizations recognize this. We recently worked with a national organization with a global mandate, seeking to enhance its impact addressing anti-Black racism in Canada. They engaged us to lead a program review and a robust engagement plan with staff, key partners, and Black-led and serving community organizations across the country to identify programmatic and campaign opportunities for the organization to advance work on systemic anti-Black racism. 

However, the engagements resulted in unanticipated insights that challenged the organization to not simply consider investments for campaigns, but reckon with their power, position, and history. 

Engagement participants asked critical questions about how the organization would build and, in some cases, repair trust and partnerships with Black-led organizations already doing the work. They were asked how they were lending their institutional power and resources to back existing, critical movement building that has been happening for years. Participants also took the organization to task about how the organization’s large, sometimes bureaucratic nature, closely aligned with governments, would be ready to align and support the radical, necessarily bold, and visionary politics of organizations at the grassroots level; how they would account for anti-Black racism internally; and more. 

While it is in the early days of the process, the organization has demonstrated keenness to receive and amplify these findings with their peers in the sector, move into action planning, and report back on how they will move forward. Although this was not the original purpose of the engagement campaign, the resulting invitation from communities to move into deep, intentional, accountable partnership is a much richer opportunity for the organization to place its efforts in driving sustainable, larger-scale impact.

Engage with accessibility in mind and a trauma-informed lens 

Conversations about accessibility frequently bring to mind access in the physical space, which is critical. Is the listening space accommodating to disabled people and people with different mobility needs? Is it easily accessible by transit? Is it gender inclusive? 

However, accessibility is also about how we support people in confidently and safely engaging. 

Building a space with intentional accessibility in mind can mean everything from building in quiet spaces to decompress or observe cultural and faith-based practices, meeting different linguistic needs, designing with neurodivergence in mind, providing free childcare, and providing a good meal. 

An accessible space should also be culturally responsive. Consider who is facilitating and how they are able to bring an informed lens in discussing experiences. How does the engagement align with community protocols? Ensure sessions don’t conflict with culturally important times of year or the week. When organizations are meeting communities in person, they also need to consider how they are mitigating health risks with COVID-19. 

A trauma-informed lens also means we are not asking people to teach us about systemic oppression or prove it exists. 

Community members are frequently put in a position where they have to explain what systemic racism, colonialism, transphobia, and other forms of oppression look and feel like. It is exhausting and dehumanizing to have to raise these issues as though it’s new information and be tasked with making the case for why it is important to address. 

It is the responsibility of the organization to name these systems and how they are designing programs and services with these realities in mind.

There are also important considerations when engaging with communities virtually. These include offering opportunities to call in using phones instead of computers, recognizing internet quality is uneven in some areas and access barriers for connection exist. It also means offering engagement sessions at different times, closed captioning, simultaneous translation, and different modalities to engage – such as surveys – for individuals who might feel less situated to share in group environments. 

At Evenings and Weekends Consulting, we also like to set the stage, offering folks to keep cameras on or off, set breaks as they need them, encourage them to step away as they need to, and ask how we can support a more engaging and inviting environment before we begin. 

It also means grounding in an understanding of mutual respect. How are we facilitating a space that enables us to listen deeply, giving grace to others and ourselves? How are we ensuring that individuals know the supports available to them if and when sharing difficult realities that can re-traumatize? How are we ensuring folks feel confident in prioritizing their needs or seeking someone to talk to?

Intentionally building relationships rather than participating in one-off engagement

Recall The Jane Finch Community Research Partnership’s (JFCRP) Connecting The Dots report, which outlined how communities felt objectified by the amount and style of engagement I mentioned earlier? In 2016, JFCRP assembled a system of protocols well worth reading and adopting for research within the community, as well as key principles that any researcher is expected to respect.

When gathering insights on services and experiences alongside sociodemographic data to understand how access and gaps differ across communities, equitable engagement and community stewardship become even more critical. In Canada, which has not had a similar established history of collecting race-based data as America, there is a lot of reluctance on the part of organizations and institutions to begin, and notable, valid skepticism from communities to share their data. While significant gains were made leveraging race-based data to understand the impact of COVID-19, there is still a lot of advocacy needed to press for more consistent collection in healthcare that will help direct resources and services to populations experiencing the worst outcomes. 

This effort is critical and demands us to move at the speed of relationships, building trust and partnership with communities, and recognizing communities have good reason to be skeptical. The motivations of institutions to collect race-based data have not always been well intended. Historically, there are harmful examples of governments and institutions gathering data based on race and Indigenous identity, religion, sexuality, and other intersections where the motivation was control, surveillance and extending the colonial project. 

But there are strong frameworks that provide a way forward to working with communities in research that includes sociodemographic data collection that focus on their consent, leadership, and direction. Engagement, Governance, Access, and Protection (EGAP) and Ownership, Control, Access, and Possession (OCAP) outline the importance of rigorous community data stewardship and partnership when it comes to decision-making with data with Black and First Nations communities, respectively.

These protocols and practices share an important understanding: community-centric engagement is not a one-off endeavor, but a partnership, where communities are engaged in decisions, reported back to, engaged for feedback and iteration, and able to meaningfully influence direction-setting. 

This includes stating clearly to communities what they can expect for next steps and thinking through channels and opportunities to hold organizations to account.

It should also consider how we’re thinking about clarity, safety, and risk. How are we verifying what we heard with the community after the fact, noting our biases or misunderstandings can affect our interpretation? It’s important to check the accuracy in documentation and that our framings and narratives do not perpetuate stigmas, have significant gaps, or share information jeopardizing anonymity. 

The benefit of the validation process is also that community members can see how they’ve been heard and how their voices fit into the broader trends and realities across communities, which can be informative and affirming. It gives community members a critical and organic way to hold organizations to account, and the knowledge gathering can provide insights to communities valuable to their advocacy.  

Research-backed and well-designed community consultation can and should be a healthy container for frank, needed conversations. What we do after those conversations is even more critical. 

Community consultation is not a good in itself; that is, relationship building and honouring the data provided by the community – and having it inform policy and actions – is the good we are striving for.