Rebalancing power in research: a chat with Chicago Beyond
Finlay Green | Researcher | @FinlayGreen_
Back in March, I was lucky enough to chat with Eva Liu, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Chicago Beyond. They’re a forward-thinking funder that shares our commitment to the progressive use of evidence in policy and practice. Like us, their work revolves around children and young people. They’ve been on our radar for a while due to the great work they’ve been supporting in Chicago (and beyond), but one of their recent publications really piqued our interest.
The paper, titled 'Why Am I Always Being Researched?', was inspired by a young man receiving services from one of the organisations they fund who asked the same profound question. Along with many others in the south of Chicago, he was aggravated by the revolving door of researchers asking their questions then taking away their answers. While the researchers benefit and their reputation grows, communities and community organisations continue to face the same challenges in the same way, waiting for the next round of researchers to come in and repeat the cycle.
'Why Am I Always Being Researched?' lays out the problems that arise when power isn’t shared in evaluation. These are problems that community members and community organisations have recognised for decades, but - as Chicago Beyond points out - are heard differently coming from a funder, due to their position of power. The publication is also a guide: it describes how community organisations, researchers, and funders can interact differently. It's well aligned with Dartington’s values (we want to make evidence useful and usable to partners) and methods (they recommend learning as you go in iterative cycles of improvement, to make sure evidence can inform decision-making when it needs to - much like our Rapid-Cycle Design and Testing method).
“You’ve got to be vulnerable. You’ve got to be able to say ‘yes, our assumptions were wrong – and you helped us to see that’.” - Quote from Eva Liu, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer at Chicago Beyond
Actions speak louder than words: ‘doing’ equity
It's easier said than done though: at Dartington, we know that establishing a more equal relationship in research is tough. It's difficult to overcome the long-held belief that evaluators are the 'experts’, that they are the ones who should set, deliver and benefit from the research agenda. At the same time, evaluation as a practice can be seen by frontline workers as a stick to beat them with, rather than a tool to help them learn.
Chicago Beyond and their partners have some great advice for rebalancing these relationships: they must be developed over time, through repeated efforts by researchers to show and own their vulnerability, to move from the abstract to the experiential, and to keep momentum.
Vulnerability:
Researchers need to begin these relationships by confronting and talking openly about the gaps in their understanding. Along the way, they need to encourage challenge from partners, take that challenge seriously, and talk openly, explicitly and personally about their weaknesses and the partner’s strengths. Delivery partners are pushed all the time to admit their faults during learning, to challenge their thinking - if they really want to share power, evaluators need to do the same.From the abstract to the experiential:
Provide early and regular 'wins' - these are moments in the project when delivery organisations inform the research and improve, deepen or strengthen the insights that emerge as a result. It's important to help partners experience, rather than imagine, how research can help them and how they can help research. This helps to establish and maintain engagement throughout the project.
Keep momentum:
Keep track of these wins. Use them as examples when partners (or the research team) waver in their commitment to equal partnership, to provide concrete evidence of how and why a shared research agenda helps everyone. The long-held assumption that evaluators are the only experts has left biases that are difficult to shake and easy to fall back into.
‘Becoming a Man’: laying the foundations
I’ve been trying to put this into practice through our collaboration with the Youth Endowment Fund, which was set up last year to tackle youth offending. We’ve been working as a learning partner for Becoming A Man (BAM), a two-year, group-based intervention delivered in schools with adolescent boys. Developed in Chicago and brought to London for the first time, BAM tries to improve education outcomes and reduce criminal activity by promoting social and emotional development.
When we started back in November 2019, there were some within our partner organisations that may have felt the evaluation wasn’t ‘for them’. As we’ve worked together, I’ve been trying to shake these perceptions. I’ve emphasised, often, the gaps in my knowledge (which are many), and how and why it’s important they own the evaluation, rather than just take part. Unsurprisingly, they’ve already helped to address many of my gaps. I’ve made a note of these moments of progress, ready to call upon them should we slip into bad habits. It’s early days, but I think we’re on the right track. As the project develops, I’ll do my best to keep Chicago Beyond’s advice in mind, to ensure that our research is generated for and by our partners and those they serve: stay vulnerable, move from the abstract to the experiential, and keep momentum.