What does it mean to be accountable to the communities whose stories, experiences, and knowledge shape our work?
Join RIA and the Equity in Action Way Foundation for our next webinar on December 9 from 12 to 1 pm. Central: “Relational Accountability: Memory, Meaning-Making, and Community Research.” RSVP here.
Relational accountability asks us to think not only about what we learn from community, but how we build relationships, honor memory, and remain accountable to the people and histories behind the data.
In this session, Dr. Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo (TERSHA LLC) and Emily Cavazos (Research in Action) will discuss practicing relational accountability through memory, meaning-making, and storytelling.
Dr. Attipoe-Dorcoo will introduce her M3 framework of Memory, Meaning-Making, and Mentions as a way to understand lived experience, collective knowledge, and storytelling as essential to systems transformation.
Emily will ground the conversation in RIA’s work with the West Side Community Organization, where community stories and archival research helped bring the historical displacement of St. Paul’s West Side Flats into public memory and supported families seeking recognition and restitution.
Together, they will explore what it looks like to treat memory as meaningful data, connect research to the histories and relationships that shape it, and practice accountability to community throughout the work.
A monthly offering from the Equity in Action Way Foundation (EAW) & Research in Action (RIA), the Community Research for Liberation webinar series highlights examples of community-centered research that disrupts top down approaches and supports a growing movement of people across the country who are reimagining research as a tool to support healing, liberation, and transformation.
Dr. Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo
Dr. Sharon Attipoe-Dorcoo is the Principal of TERSHA LLC and an award-winning strategist, author, and systems leader who advances narrative sovereignty through data-informed storytelling and relational governance. With more than two decades of experience, she brings expertise in research, evaluation, systems design, language access, accessibility, and community health workforce development, shaped by leadership roles at DHS, CDC, and across philanthropic and nonprofit networks. A recognized thought leader with 70+ publications, she is a 2022 Public Voices Fellow, Global South Arts and Health Envoy, Adjunct Faculty at Texas Woman’s University, and nominee for the National Academy of Medicine Emerging Leaders Forum. Sharon holds a PhD in Health Policy and an MPH, has lived experience as a diasporic Ghanaian-American woman of faith, wife, and mom, and is deeply committed to building systems rooted in care, dignity, and inclusive impact. Her M3 framework would be guiding our conversation today.
Emily Cavazos
Emily Cavazos, Quantitative, GIS/Mapping, and Archival Expert, specializes in conducting quantitative analyses and mapping of secondary sources and available archival data, providing expertise in designing research, collecting and analyzing data, synthesizing findings, and communicating insights using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and digital archival platforms. Additionally, Emily has extensive experience with community engagement to ensure reach of data collection, such as surveys, while maintaining authentic relationships. Emily has extensive practice cleaning and analyzing complex datasets and making results accessible to an array of audiences.