This week of posts is brought to you by SFBAE, with articles written by SFBAE members and focused on the value of community for evaluators and evaluation.
Greetings fellow evaluators! I am Oscar Cerna, a member of the San Francisco Bay Area Evaluators (SFBAE) and the Director of Evaluation, Research and Impact (ERI) at Flourish Agenda, Inc., which is a national education consulting firm based in Oakland, CA. For more than 30 years, our training and youth camp teams have worked with schools, youth-serving organizations and government agencies to build and implement strategies that allow young people of color to flourish. Flourish Agenda’s healing centered engagement (HCE) introduces a more holistic approach to fostering well-being by recognizing that trauma is not an isolated experience—but instead that trauma and healing from trauma are experienced collectively. We equip system leaders and youth service providers with curricula, training, and tools that are grounded in this understanding.
Flourish Agenda has also reimagined new approaches for researching and evaluating culturally based healing strategies that promote well-being, which are not easily captured by conventional research and evaluation methods. Deficit based theories and practices prevail in education and youth services because of the limited evidence base that goes overlooked about the impact of culture, identity and belonging on healing outcomes. A more holistic, nuanced, culturally grounded approach to research and evaluation helps us to fully understand the lived experiences of those from communities of color under study. We are calling this approach “Emancipatory Inquiry.”
Emancipatory Inquiry emerges from community knowledge. It is asset based, focused on examining community and individual attributes and qualities that can contribute to healing and well-being outcomes. Emancipatory Inquiry promotes action and engagement as part of the research process and further breaks down barriers between the lived experiences of researcher and research subjects.
Our early development of an Emancipatory Inquiry method includes a comprehensive literature review highlighting studies and scholarly contributions that support various essential domains of both the “root causes of harm” and the “root causes of well-being” which can contribute to simultaneous trauma and healing youth of color experience. The literature review covers some domains related to harm, such as an “us vs them mentality,” “othering” and “dehumanization.” Conversely, the root cause of well-being manifests in domains such as “meaningful connections,” “belonging ” and “humanization.”
Another key goal of Emancipatory Inquiry is to establish a Community of Practice (CoP) that periodically brings together researchers, practitioners and educators from participating schools and organizations to build knowledge, tools and strategies for sustainable culturally-based healing methods. This includes applying new ways of democratizing findings and lessons focused on promoting culturally-based healing strategies in mutually-beneficial ways across different stakeholders.
Discussions and activities of the CoP include:
- Learning what culturally-based healing practices are being used and which are considered effective when working with youth and families of color.
- Discussing empirical studies and theories focused on the underlying causes of harm and well-being for youth of color.
- Identifying and troubleshooting for challenges when implementing organizational practices aimed to address youth trauma while creating transformational relationships between youth of color and adult educators.
- Exploring the connections between individual and collective outcomes of healing and well-being.
- Adopting or adapting lessons from other methods used to democratize data collection and sharing, such as storytelling, appreciative inquiry, participatory action research and intercultural responsive evaluation.
Lessons Learned
The lessons and insights from our CoP and from the individual research and evaluation work being conducted across our participating organizations will be gathered and shared as part of short reports, blog entries and presentations at conferences or community events in the near future.
For additional information about Emancipatory Inquiry, contact me via LinkedIn.
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