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Articles, insights, and resources from Community Science on research, evaluation, leadership, equity, and strategies for community change.

Transformational Healing: Facing Hard Truths – Part 1 of 2

By |2025-08-25T10:21:03-04:00March 26, 2025|Blog|

Shifting Trauma from an Individual to a Collective Responsibility In a prior post, Healing: A Path to Personal and Collective Liberation, I discussed how systemic oppression has shaped living conditions that harm our physical, environmental, mental, emotional, and spiritual well-being. Healing is not just personal - it is deeply tied to processing the trauma that oppressed and marginalized communities have endured for centuries. These conditions have caused historical trauma -…

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Building Bridges and Mobilizing Collective Action Parental Involvement in Achieving Assessment Equity

By |2025-08-25T13:38:56-04:00February 28, 2024|Blog|

Join us for a webinar on this topic. Equitable Measures: The Role of Assessments in Education Do your assessment methods help or hinder students from historically underserved communities? Join us for a pivotal hour-long webinar, "Equitable Measures: The Role of Assessments in Education," where we navigate the complex terrain of educational assessments and their far-reaching impact on equitable access to educational opportunities and resources. Featuring insights from Bruce Johnson, Senior…

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Parent Leadership in Disney’s Encanto: Support Our Families, Strengthen Our Communities

By |2024-01-31T08:41:56-05:00January 29, 2024|Blog|

Parent leadership has a positive impact on children, families, and society. Carlos Anguiano, Managing Associate, explores this topic through an insightful exploration of cultural influences and family dynamics as exemplified in Disney's "Encanto." Drawing on personal experiences of a Mexican American upbringing, this post delves into the parallels between the film's characters, especially Abuela and Mirabel, and real-life family values and responsibilities.

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Designing Research with Intention: Culturally Responsive, Trauma-Informed, and Humanizing Strategies to Engage Youth

By |2025-08-25T10:47:05-04:00October 31, 2023|Blog|

Conducting research study interviews with youth who have experienced significant life challenges - homelessness, intimate partner violence, childhood abuse, or other traumas - demands a delicate, compassionate approach. The challenge lies in gathering meaningful data while ensuring a safe and supportive interview environment for the participants. There are four major practices that can help researchers navigate sensitive conversations with youth. Remember, these may need to be adapted to suit individual…

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The Sustainability Case: Paying Explicit Attention to How and Why Nonprofits Engage and Include Different Perspectives

By |2025-08-25T10:48:35-04:00October 9, 2023|Blog|

What is the sustainability case? An organization's health, success, and longevity - that is, its sustainability - is more achievable when it invests time and resources to engage, value, and include different perspectives and lived experiences inside the organization and in the communities with which it works and serves. Many nonprofits feel ethically and morally compelled to invest in diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) and some even feel that this…

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Making Community Engagement Transformative: Lessons Learned for Those Who Really Want to Build and Shift Power

By |2025-08-25T10:49:47-04:00September 12, 2023|Blog|

There has been a recent resurgence in supporting greater community engagement by foundations, government agencies, and nonprofits. Currently, these institutions feel a sense of urgency to eliminate racial inequities. In order to achieve equitable systems, there must be equity in the power that actually influences those systems to provide what these communities want, not just to inform them. Community engagement merely to collect information or sensing priorities will not be…

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