If you ask Gail Roderigues about New Bedford, there’s a particular feature she loves to tell people about: a colorful mural featuring a Cape Verdean grandmother and granddaughter, a Cape Verdean flag-patterned shirt, a toy ship, and purse with a “vote” button on it. It’s positioned at the end of the Cape Verdean Recognition Parade route and is designed to “let [Cape Verdeans] know that it’s important to keep their culture alive in the face of gentrification,” says Roderigues.
Celebrating the culture and resilience of her home is key to why Roderigues got involved with Participatory Action Research, an innovative approach to community building. This strategy prioritizes community participation in research and then uses that research for residents to make meaningful change in communities. As Anisha Patil, CLF’s manager of community research, puts it, “We’re learning things for the sake of taking action.”
Now Roderigues, alongside more than two dozen other resident researchers across Massachusetts, uses Participatory Action Research to address issues of importance to her neighbors – including contributing to the mural project. After 10 years of work, resident researchers in the Healthy Neighborhoods Study have led projects that have accomplished everything from increasing access to fresh produce to raising awareness of gentrification. And it all started with a new perspective on who should conduct research and who it should be for.
How Participatory Action Research Fuels the Healthy Neighborhoods Study
Ten years ago, CLF launched the Healthy Neighborhoods Study in partnership with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and nine community-based organizations. The study recruited 45 resident researchers from nine Massachusetts communities, with funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The project was designed to better understand how to build healthier, more resilient communities. Embracing Participatory Action Research was a core part of its mission from the beginning.
Traditional social science research follows a straightforward model: A research team comes into a community, conducts surveys, then publishes their findings. Residents participate as subjects, not leaders. The benefits that could be pulled from the data sometimes wind up hidden in an academic research journal.
Participatory Action Research turns that model on its head. “Who’s best suited to solve a problem in their community? That would be the residents,” says Roderigues. It’s a common-sense observation that some traditional academic research overlooks.
Participatory Action Research involves community members as partners and leaders from the start. Resident researchers are hired from the communities where research will take place to provide invaluable lived experience. Researchers meet to discuss what issues are most pressing in their community. Past projects have centered on climate change, affordable housing, gentrification, access to healthy food, and other key challenges to building a healthy neighborhood.
Gathering Data, Taking Action
Once they select an issue, resident researchers and CLF’s social scientists each contribute their expertise to developing the initial research surveys. David Underhill, a resident researcher in Fall River, Massachusetts, was perfectly positioned to help refine a survey of people using public housing for one key reason – he lived in the housing projects in question.
[Participatory Action Research] gives people an opportunity to find a way to solve the problems that hit everybody in everyday life. I just think it’s a fantastic way to do things. The everyday people – the workers, the resident researchers – they’re all just everyday people. You don’t have to be a scholar. You can be a teenager, you can be a senior citizen – everyone has an opinion and everyone works together.
-David Underhill
Once researchers collect the data, the study participants move onto the “action” part of “Participatory Action Research.” “By participating in it and doing the research, that’s how you get the data and try to [make] changes,” says Underhill. He turned the data over to Patil to crunch the numbers, knowing the Healthy Neighborhoods Study researcher would return useable insights. He and Patil analyzed the results together. Once Underhill had those insights in hand, he was able to reach out to specific public housing buildings to share concerns residents had about security, cleanliness, and other quality-of-life concerns.
Drawing On Lived Experience
Roderigues also used the Participatory Action Research approach for the mural project. She liked using the data collection process to support residents in coming to their own conclusions, asking them, “Are there any open spaces available to you in your neighborhood? Did you have any say or participate in the planning of that? Did you vote in the last election? Are you registered to vote?”
The team’s survey data showed that residents born outside of the country had lower civic engagement than those born in the United States. The researchers wanted the coastal city’s large Cape Verdean population to understand that its voice matters, especially when it comes to housing and development. Reflecting Participatory Action Research’s creative perspective on problem-solving, they commissioned vibrant public art as the medium for that message.
In addition to the mural, Roderigues is particularly proud of a recent project that she says really exemplifies the principles of Participatory Action Research. New Bedford sits on a harbor so contaminated by an old electronics factory that the government designated it as a Superfund site, dredged tons of contaminated soil, and banned fishing to this day. In response, she and other New Bedford residents started organizing environmental justice tours as part of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study. The tour visited sites that covered the struggles, triumphs, history, and future of her home, with a focus on how environmental justice shaped the city.
During one tour, a woman remembered climbing all over a heavily polluted site with her friends as a child before the city put a fence around it. Roderigues was inspired by how the woman’s story built the community’s awareness of their home. “Hardly one [tour] went by when we didn’t learn something we didn’t already know from a participant,” says Roderigues. “That’s real [Participatory Action Research] right there, building that trust and having the participants … recall their lived experience.”
In typical Participatory Action Research fashion, they wound up learning as much from the community members as they taught. Roderigues and the other researchers used the information they gathered to conduct educational outreach, including creating a Story Map, writing a children’s book and placing it in a local library, hosting story times, and even creating a template of the book so other communities can follow their example.
The Future of the Healthy Neighborhoods Study and Participatory Action Research
The Healthy Neighborhoods Study recently concluded its original 10-year grant. The initial consortium of groups and researchers that established the Study plan to transition into a network, open to adding new organizations. At CLF, we’re exploring how the 10 years of community-based data can contribute to our work with communities across New England.
Whatever the next iteration of this work looks like, Participatory Action Research will remain its heart. Following the lead of impacted communities is key to making effective change. “It’s about changing who has the power in research, and who is the one doing it and making decisions,” says Patil.
The Healthy Neighborhoods Study’s impact continues to ripple through communities. Underhill says he initially joined the Healthy Neighborhoods Study to make a little extra money, but now he’s proud of the work he’s done with tenants and housing authorities and plans to continue.
Roderigues is happy with the lasting changes her Participatory Action Research work helped bring about in New Bedford, including the mural celebrating Cape Verdean immigrant communities. After all, the environmental justice tours don’t just highlight areas where the community has struggled. The tours also highlight how people have come together and triumphed – including a stop at the mural to share the artwork’s story. Roderigues says, “Today, [the mural’s] still everyone’s favorite.”