RESEARCH BRIEF SEPTEMBER 2020
Community Participatory Action Research: Co-Researching Disparities with Broward’s Child Welfare Participants and System Partners Principal Investigator(s): Dr. Sue Gallagher Project Team: Dr. Carl M. Dasse, Dr. Seanteé Campbell, and CPAR co-researchers
BACKGROUND Community-based Participatory Action Research (CPAR) is a collaborative approach to research that involves all stakeholders throughout the research process, from establishing the research question, to developing data collection tools, to analysis and dissemination of findings. It is a research framework that aims to address the practical concerns of people in a community and fundamentally changes the roles of researcher and who is being researched. The CPAR framework begins with a community’s issue, proposed action, or strategy and then supports or enhances this action with research that is community based and engaged.1 It frames research to be: community based—grounded in the needs, issues, concerns, and strategies of communities and the community-based organizations that serve them; participatory—directly engaging communities and community knowledge in the research process and its outcomes; action based and oriented—supporting and/or enhancing the strategic action that leads to community transformation and social change. By its nature, CPAR is applied research; it seeks to change issues that are critical to communities and focuses on engaging community members in research directed at addressing their social concerns. It is derived from several research approaches that are based on communities collaborating with researchers (ex. community-based research), or community members engaging in all aspects of the research process (ex. participatory action research, or action research).2
METHODOLOGY With Florida Institute for Child Welfare funding, the Broward County Children’s Services Council (CSC) employed a Community Participatory Action Research framework infused with a racial equity lens to improve the quality of living and outcomes for children and families in Broward County’s child welfare System. CPAR provides a methodological framework for people with lived experiences (i.e. system participants) in the child welfare system and system professionals to build trusting relationships. The CPAR process transformed the two groups into “co-researchers” with the research skills and mutual trust required to collaboratively co-identify and co-create solutions to systemic issues. Twenty co-researchers were recruited for the CPAR project: a) ten system participants (six youth transitioning to independent living, three parents whose children were removed by the system, and one foster parent); b) nine system professionals (three community-based care lead agency (CBC) employees, one child protection investigation Section supervising investigator, two CSC funded co-Investigators; a FAU graduate student working on her social work practicum hours; a supervisor from Kids In Distress, and a representative from the Florida Coalition for Children. The participants attended the Racial Equity Institute’s (REI) Phase 1 Racial Equity training to provide a common language to understand and discuss how systemic racism creates the child welfare system’s disparities. The REI training was augmented by Implicit Bias training that includes a local history of systemic racism in Broward County. This training helped the co-researchers understand how institutionalized racism created during the Jim Crow era impacts the Broward’s child welfare system today, and how implicit bias influences the perceptions of people of color. A Youth Leaders in Action Project (Y-LAP) team was created consisting of one CBC employee, one CSC research manager, and seven youth transitioning to independent living (TIL youth). The Y-LAP team conducted three focus groups (two with seventeen TIL youth and one with eight CSC funded case managers working with TIL youth) to better understand how youth felt about their experiences in the child welfare system. They then shared their focus group findings with the seven system leaders responsible for funding, administering and implementing Broward’s child welfare system to learn if these professionals understood what the children they served, felt about the services their agencies provide. As a collective, Y-LAP decided their CPAR product would be to create and implement a youth and system professional organizing effort (Youth System Organizers of Broward – YSO). The stated goal of YSO is that through collective action (i.e. organizing), youth transitioning to independence and likeminded system professionals will gain power in the child welfare system to ensure systemic responsiveness to the voices, concerns, and needs of system involved youth. The Y-LAP team spent January through April 2020 defining the organizational structure and policy objectives of YSO and negotiated with the two existing child welfare youth serving organizations (Florida Youth Shine and You Matter) in Broward County as they are focused on youth advocacy. Based on their researcher and negotiations with Florida Youth Shine and You Matter, the Y-LAP team created a virtual presentation for the various child welfare serving organizations in Broward County whose support they needed in order to be effective. 1
National Institutes of Health. (2010). Community-based Participatory Research. Retrieved from http://obssr.od.nih.gov/scientific_areas/ methodology/community_based_participatory_ research/index.aspx
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Advancement Project (2011). A short guide to community-based participatory action research: A community research lab guide.
In April through June of 2020, the Y-LAP (hereinafter YSO) team began reaching out to the various child welfare serving organizations in Broward County and achieved the following: 1) The Urban League of Broward County, Family Engagement Advisory Board assigned one of the YSO youth to serve on their governing board. 2) Florida Youth Shine, You Matter and YSO agreed to support one another and enhance the opportunities to empower youth transitioning to independent living (TIL). 3) The YSO presented their findings to the Children and Families Legislative Agenda (CFLA) in May 2020, and were given a seat on CFLA. 4) YSO was provided a leadership opportunity on HOPE Court [i.e., Legal Aid’s Florida BAR funded Restorative Justice Project working with Broward’s Dependency Court Judges and 20 TIL youth]. 5) The Children Services Council agreed to fund $75,000 of their annual budget to fund a Community/Youth Organizer to help sustain the YSO of Broward, and pay the YSO youth transitioning to independent living. 6) the Broward TIL Steering Committee offered YSO a seat on their leadership board. A Very Important Parents (VIP) group was also created of child welfare professionals and parents with lived experiences in the child welfare system (foster parents and parents who experienced children being removed and in two cases being successfully reunified), a research and evaluation manager and a training manager (former foster parent) employed by the CSC. The VIP group’s research project was to develop and implement parent prevention outreach to help families in need of services thrive, so they do not enter the child welfare system. The VIP group met weekly in the Fall 2019, developed a parent interview questionnaire, trained the co-researchers to administer in-depth interviews, created and distributed a parent interview recruitment flyer, and successfully interviewed a diverse group of nine parents whose children were removed by Child Protective Services Investigators. The VIP group analyzed the transcriptions from their nine interviews at the January CPAR workshop, and determined that their CPAR product would be a parent education video designed to: 1) improve access to support services that prevent families from entering into the Child Welfare system; and 2) to help system professionals understand the de-humanization parents feel as they navigate the child welfare system to be re-unified with their children. The VIP group developed a script for the video and the CSC executed a production contract with The Animation Project to produce the short video and created a list of family resources to be included in the video. A VIP continues to regularly share her experiences navigating the system with child welfare system professionals to help them understand how their interactions with the parents they serve, impacts how parents feel about their chance of being reunited with their child.
CONCLUSION The co-researchers’ shared expertise enabled the relationships among system participants and system professionals to go from a deficitbased positionality (i.e., another angry/frustrated parent or TIL youth talking about how they have been mistreated) to a conversation about the systemic problems that parents and youth transitioning to independent living often experience in the child welfare system (i.e., dehumanization of parents and feelings of fake empathy towards TIL youth). Infusing the CPAR framework with a racial equity lens helped system participants and system professionals further remove themselves from the individual blame conversation and focuses on the systemic problems (e.g. system racism) that cause or make worse many of the issues they co-identify as needing to be addressed.
KEY FINDINGS AND POLICY RECOMMENDATIONS Several findings and recommendations are shared for consideration. • Youth in and transitioning out of the child welfare system feel powerless in the system. • Most system professionals lack the lived experiences as a child in the system to be truly empathetic to the children/youth they serve. • Youth transitioning to independent living and likeminded system professionals need to adopt community organizing strategies to empower the YSO youth, so they can work together to help ensure program quality, shared system accountability, and foster trusting relationships between system-involved children/youth and system professionals. • Improving access to support services is necessary to prevent families from entering the child welfare system. • System professionals need help to better understand the de-humanization parents feel as they navigate the child welfare system to reunify with their children.
FLORIDA INSTITUTE FOR CHILD WELFARE
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