Accountability is an ongoing practice we are all committed to as we collectively process institutional and systemic harms, uncover contentious histories and languages, and grapple with deeply challenging questions and possible solutions. Tension, discomfort and conflict are natural and will occur. With this recognition, Research in Action is committed to naming and mitigating the harms of white supremacy culture that prevent transformative change by holding space for generative conflict management and bridging all collaborators to external resources when significant harm has occurred.

Actionable Research rejects the idea that knowledge creation is for the privileged few and uplifts how community members are creating knowledge in their everyday lives. Actionable research recognizes that community expertise reveals what the problem is and how to solve it, and leads directly to specific, real world changes that can repair that harm.

In traditional Community Engagement an institution or entity with power and resources comes into impacted communities with a plan to redress a problem that they have determined is the most important or pressing problem to address. They either hold listening or engagement sessions to exact information or ideas to appear interested in the solutions that those impacted share already knowing what's in their power and control and what they intend to do or they simply come in and tell community what plan they have already developed and provide no resolution to the issues that community raise that they believe falls outside the purview of their work or institutional powers. Research in Action rejects these extractive, top down models and instead engages in Equity in Action–a model that redistributes power and is accountable to the inherent leadership of impacted community members at every step of the process.

Our Community-led Process does not simply consult or seek feedback from community members on a question or idea created without them, but redistributes power to the people most impacted to direct that process from the start. It elevates community members as project leaders at every stage of our work, from using their expertise to describe the problem to developing our research processes and tools. This process supports community members building power, capacity, and infrastructure in their communities to continue to make change after the project has ended.

In our community-led processes, we confront and redistribute the differential power among partners and impacted communities. We recognize the many ways generations of white supremacy and structural racism have entrenched imbalanced power relationships that concentrate resources — money, influence, racial privilege and more — in the hands of the few. Through our iterative and accountable Equity in Action model, we ensure all collaborators are invested in disrupting these harmful patterns to share, rather than hoard, power with impacted communities.

We are co-creating emergent methodologies as an act of discovery in collaboration with community. We begin with the question impacted people want to answer and identify the most effective and grounded research strategies to not just understand or predict but to solve the stated problem. We resist the notion that quantitative research — collecting and analyzing numerical data — is more valid than qualitative research, which creates space for people to share their direct experiences through interviews and other engagements. We reject the false premise that if “you can’t measure it, it doesn’t exist,” because data requires grounded human context to guide and inform our collective analysis. We are discerning and intentional in creating mixed-method approaches that uproot racist presumptions and cultivate iterative processes that privilege lived experience as rigorous and actionable data, and create power for and accountability with impacted communities.

We embrace the role of research in collective community healing by engaging in relational processes that affirm and prioritize participants’ full humanity, provide tools and models for transformative change, and take tangible steps to repair current and historic harms to impacted communities by redefining the research process to center grounded community leadership to define and redefine the issues and the lens from which we derive meaning.

Impacted Communities are not figure heads, service providers or organization leaders; they are the individuals who personally experience a specific issue, either directly in their daily lives or as a result of historic oppression on their families and communities. Despite and because of these barriers, impacted communities are creative, strong and already working together — so their knowledge and ideas are essential and their voices must hold the most weight in accurately identifying and solving the problems they experience.

Rather than a fixed and linear process, our work is iterative and responsive. We recognize that creating change requires constant shifts and adjustments to not simply receive input at every step but act on that input to consistently redirect power to impacted community members. We reject urgency because we know that building accountable relationships is an essential step to unraveling the intertwined and complex problems we seek to address.

Rather than transactional relationships with clients, Research in Action engages in a candid and transparent discovery process to identify aligned partners. Our partners are groups or institutions with positional power that embrace ongoing learning, commit to a radically different research approach, and seek to cultivate reciprocal relationships that are accountable to and benefit impacted community on their own terms.

Racial justice proactively and authentically partners with Black, brown and Indigenous people to acknowledge and eliminate white supremacy, the systematic impact of racism, the harms of anti-Blackness, and the oppressive policies and practices upheld by institutions that prevent marginalized people from exercising their full humanity. It demands strategic and purposeful action with impacted communities leading the work to create material change in people’s everyday lives, and to heal the multifaceted trauma of generations of exploitation and intentional harm.

In our Equity in Action model, Shared Meaning Making is ongoing throughout the process to ensure collective understanding, iterative assessment and targeted outcomes. We use our technical skills as researchers to create space for all collaborators to develop a shared understanding of key language to describe the context and define the problem together. We ensure all collaborators recognize the specific gaps our research seeks to fill and the goals of the project. In all steps of the process, we revisit our shared values and reassess our collective knowledge based on what we’re learning from each other and impacted community to ensure our process results in concrete policies and practices most needed by impacted communities.