Accountability is an ongoing practice. We commit to collectively processing institutional and systemic harms, uncovering contentious histories and languages, and grappling with difficult questions. In this process, we will experience tension, discomfort and conflict. At Research in Action we support community and partners to navigate conflict in ways that lead to deeper understanding and better solutions. In our spaces, we also name and address the harms of white supremacy culture and bridge participants 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, people or organizations with power decide something is a problem and enter impacted communities with a proposed solution. They hold listening sessions or engagement events to gather feedback and ideas from impacted communities. They engage with community members, but they retain the power to make the final decisions and set the parameters for what is possible. Research in Action replaces these extractive, top down models with Community-Led Processes that redistribute power to community members from the start.

Our Community-Led Process redistributes power to the most impacted communities from the start of the process to the final decisionmaking. Rather than seeking feedback on ideas created without them, we elevate community members as project leaders and content experts at every stage of our work, from describing the problem to developing research processes to determining meaningful solutions. Rather than a transactional approach, our process actively supports community members in building power, capacity, and knowledge to continue to make change after the project has ended. 

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. In our community-led processes, we confront and redistribute the differential power among partners and impacted communities. 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.  

Emergent methodologies are the ways we collaborate with community to discover new ways to conduct research — always beginning with the question the community wants answered. We believe that the stories and lived experiences of impacted communities are just as important as numerical data. By embracing both qualitative and quantitative research, we are co-creating more holistic ways to understand problems and uncover radical solutions that make a lasting difference in people's everyday lives.  

Healing is a complex process, and while imperfect, community-led research can guide ways to promote collective healing. In our work, we create relational processes that affirm and prioritize participants’ full humanity. By defining the problem together, developing new shared understandings, and co-developing solutions, we seek to support collective healing.

Impacted communities are the individuals and groups whose lives have been shaped by various forms of inequity and oppression. In any given project, impacted communities are the people who personally and directly experience the problem, the people who are closest to the harm. They are not non-profit organizations or figure heads who speak on behalf of community. In our work, impacted communities are essential leaders and their voices hold the most weight in accurately identifying and solving the problems they experience. 

Change doesn't happen in a straight line. It curves and bends based on the changing conditions it encounters. At RIA, our work is iterative and responsive. To act on community input, we reject false urgency and embrace shifts and adjustments at every step in the process to make sure the outcome is accountable and actionable.

Research in Action engages in a candid and transparent discovery process to identify aligned partners. Rather than transactional relationships with clients, 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.  

In our work, racial justice requires strategic and purposeful action with Black, brown and Indigenous people to acknowledge and eliminate the impact of white supremacy, systematic racism, anti-Blackness, and the oppressive policies and practices that prevent marginalized people from exercising their full humanity. It demands solutions that create material change in people’s everyday lives and heal the multifaceted trauma of generations of exploitation and intentional harm.

Shared Meaning Making is an iterative, ongoing process to develop collective understanding, make sure our work reflects what we learn along the way and achieve targeted outcomes we’ve set together. To do this, we use our technical skills as researchers to create space for all collaborators to develop mutual understanding of key language, shared values, research gaps and project goals. Throughout the process, we constantly reflect and adapt to what we’re learning to ensure we deliver accountable and actionable outcomes for impacted communities.