Description:
A Guidebook For Community Organizations, Researchers, And Funders To Help Us Get From Insufficient Understanding To More Authentic Truth
Executive Summary:
As an impact investor that backs the fight for youth equity, Chicago Beyond has partnered with and invested in community organizations working toward providing more equitable access and opportunity to young people across Chicago. In many cases, we have also invested in sizable research projects to help our community partners grow the impact of their work.
Our hope is that the research will generate learnings to impact more youth in our city and nationwide, and arm our partners with the “evidence” they need to secure funding for what is working.
Through the course of our investing, another sort of evidence emerged: evidence that the power dynamic between community organizations, researchers, and funders blocks information that could drive better decision-making and fuel more investment in communities most in need. This power dynamic creates an uneven field on which research is designed and allows unintended bias to seep into how knowledge is generated.
There are many voices in the social impact space who have begun to call out this power dynamic.
“Grantmaking is not trusting of the community, and the community is not trusting of funders.”
— Edgar Villanueva, author of Decolonizing Wealth
In annual letters, the President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, pushes funders to reckon with privilege, acknowledging that communities closest to the problems possess unique insight into the solutions. The power dynamic in the social impact space is impeding our collective efforts to create a better world.
Right or wrong, research drives decisions. If we do not address the power dynamic in research creation, at best, we are making decisions based on partial truths. At worst, we are generating inaccurate information that harms the very communities we aim to serve. This is why we must care about how research is created.
In this publication, we offer ways to level the playing field and mitigate unintended bias in research. Chicago Beyond created this guidebook to help shift the power dynamic and transform how community organizations, researchers, and funders uncover knowledge together.
This equity-based approach to research offers a pathway to restoring communities as authors and owners of knowledge. It is based on the steps and missteps of Chicago Beyond’s own experience funding community organizations and research—alongside the courageous and patient efforts of our partners, the youth they serve, and others with whom we have learned.
Download:
ChicagoBeyond_2019Guidebook.pdf (5.5 MB)
Tags
community-engagement, inclusive-research, participatory, bias-reduction