Now that’s what we call RESEARCH JUSTICE!

Research justice involves a process in which one youth, immigrant, or low-wage worker meets a peer and says, “I am struggling.” That peer responds and says, “I am too.” They share their first-hand knowledge, and, in doing so, two “I” statements are transformed into a “WE” statement. In 2011, DataCenter has helped numerous communities come together and build a resounding chorus of “WE!” Check out this issue of our newsletter to hear how individuals have come together to make a WE. They stand in power, confident of their knowledge.

Communities on the margins, coming together, learning together and raising their collective voice at the center of the decision-making process…now that’s what we call Research Justice!

Download full newsletter (pdf)

Page one (pdf)

• Research Unlocks the Power of Youth in Oakland
• Toxic Beauty No More! Nail Salon Workers Advocate for Their Rights and Safety

Page two (pdf)

• Letter from miho kim, Executive Director
• DataCenter Staff and Board

Page three (pdf)

• From Suspicion to Protection: Muslim Americans Contest Racial Profiling
• Toxic Beauty No More (con’t) with Fast Facts!

Page four (pdf)

• Bringing Justice on the Bus! DataCenter With POWER for Transportation Justice
• Putting the “Care” Back in Foster Care: LGBT Group in Utah Examines and Advocates for Care Standards

Page five (pdf)

• Donor Profile: Isabel Kang from Shimtuh
• “I’m Not Alone!” National Domestic Worker Project Continues to Empower

Page six (pdf)

• Victory! Wage Theft Ordinance Passes in San Francisco!

This is a wonderful recognition of the success of DataCenter’s shared leadership model.

Join us for the award ceremony at YNPNsfba’s 14th Annual Party! Date: Thursday, September 15, 2011, Time: 6:00 – 9:00 PM. Click here for more details!

Do you enjoy bathroom breaks and sick time at work? Does your paycheck arrive on time every month?

While these standard labor practices are recognized in many workplaces, there are still employers who regularly and unapologetically refuse to recognize the law. As a result, hundreds of employees endure abusive working conditions each year in the City of San Francisco alone.

Progressive Workers Alliance outside Wage Theft Hearing. Photo credit: Asian American Movement Ezine (apimovement.com)

However, these employees now have a chance at justice. And in your support of DataCenter, you had a hand in elevating the voices of workers so they can demand that chance. On August 2, 2011, San Francisco city officials enacted the Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance, which strengthens the city’s ability to enforce labor laws. Led by the Progressive Worker Alliance, the campaign was fortified by the 2010 Chinese Progressive Association Report Check, Please!, which DataCenter helped write, that exposed the sweatshop conditions of Chinatown restaurant workers.

Campaign organizer Shaw-san Liu of Chinese Progressive Alliance said, “The Progressive Workers Alliance Campaign to End Wage Theft has been going really well, and our report on Chinatown health and working conditions has been a key part of laying the groundwork. [The Check, Please! Report] contributions are huge to our organizing work today!”

As one San Francisco low-wage worker and wage theft victim said in the Check, Please! study,

“Being a dog would be better than being a worker in the United States.”

The Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance in San Francisco seeks to change this fact. The ordinance grants more power to the San Francisco Office of Labor Standards and Enforcement, which investigates wage theft cases in the city. Additionally, employers who retaliate against a worker who reports an abuse will now pay a double fine. (Read the full ordinance.)

The stories and testimonies of low-wage workers, both in the Check, Please! Report and city council hearings, were the driving force of creating positive, imperative social change for workers in San Francisco. The San Francisco Wage Theft Prevention Ordinance is one step closer to justice for workers in the city community and across the globe.

Other partners that participated in the implementation of the Check, Please! Report include San Francisco Department of Public Health; University of California San Francisco Medical School; University of California Berkeley School of Public Health; and the University of California, Berkeley Labor Occupational Health Program.

A young Khmer woman presents the KGA survey that she helped conduct.

Read more about DataCenter Training Services!

For the past two years, DataCenter has provided training support and capacity building to Khmer Girls in Action (KGA),  in Long Beach, California that trains young Southeast Asian women to be “relevant social justice organizers who can respond to the immediate needs of the community.” It is organizations like KGA who empower immigrants and 2nd generation immigrant youth to voice their concerns and be justice leaders in their communities.

The 500 surveys of Khmer Youth covered three topics: Reproductive Justice, Immigrant & Refugee Rights and Health & Safety.  After releasing the preliminary report, KGA recently completed a Listening Campaign that will help the Khmer youth, now experts in their community, determine what social and political action they want to take as a result of the information they gathered. During this campaign, over 50 youth and community members discussed the data that has been collected. KGA youth and staff will be presenting the survey and listening campaign results at a number of statewide and national events including:

• USD SOLES Action Research Conference, San Diego, CA
• UCI Asian Women’s Health Summit, Irvine, CA
• API Summit in Sacramento, CA
• SEARAC’s Leadership & Advocacy Training, Washington D.C. and,
• Sistersong’s National Let’s Talk About Sex Conference, Miami, FL

DataCenter is currently support the writing of a full formal report of the survey—stayed tuned for its release and to see how the Khmer youth put their data in action!

Until then, here’s your chance to put some data into action: take a quiz of the survey results and see what you know!

Read more about our work with Khmer Youth!

__________________________________________

Question #1:
1 in 3 youth identify themselves or someone in their family as __________

a)      LGBTQI

b)      Hipster

c)      An activist

Question #2:
1 in ____ youth don’t know where to get tested for pregnancy, STI, STD, or HIV/AIDs

a)      2

b)      10

c)      4

Question #3:
1 in 3 Khmer youth know someone in their family or community who has _____________

a)      Experienced discrimination

b)      Gone skydiving

c)      Been deported or is facing deportation

Question #4:

54% of Khmer youth felt that the Cambodian community faces discrimination. The youth identified 4 key areas of discrimination. Of the areas listed below, which one is NOT one of the 4 key areas?

a)      Language access

b)      Job opportunities

c)      Racial profiling

d)     Education attainment

e)      Natural disaster infrastructure

Question #5:
1 in ____ Khmer Youth was frequently stopped or pulled over by police in 2009

a)      3

b)      5

c)      20

__________________________________________

Answers:

1. (a)
2. (c)
3. (c)
4. (e)
5. (a)

We are all looking for ways to do our work better. Donors like you give generously to our organization and we want to make sure that every dollar you give is used to fulfill our shared mission and create a better world. The David and Lucile Packard Foundation disburses numerous grants across the world to help organizations function better, and, as a result, help more people and support more communities in more places.

But how do foundations help nonprofits use their grant money to make the deepest impact possible? Over the past two years, DataCenter has been helping the Packard Foundation discover answers to this question. In partnership with Jeff Jackson and Maurice Monette of the Vallarta Institute, Christie Callenback and the *TCC Group, DataCenter recently studied a *sample of 1300 organizational capacity building initiatives across the globe that were funded by the Packard Foundation.

True capacity building efforts last longer than one or two years. In addition to surveying grantee report data from the Packard Foundation, DataCenter surveyed grant recipients to determine what were the results two, three, four and five years after the funding has been used.

In this project, DataCenter played the role of translator: helping the experiences of grantees make it to the ears of foundations that support them. As Linda Wood of the Evenlyn and Walter Haas Jr. Fund said, the Packard Foundation “has a goldmine of data that, if made more widely available, could really help the field of nonprofit capacity building.”

Project findings revealed some of the “keys to success” that are necessary when *capacity-building consultants are working with nonprofits. These “keys to success” include that:

• *The consultant has an understanding of nonprofit grantees’ unique needs
• *There is ongoing communication and trusting relationships between the consultant and the nonprofit grantee

Any supporter of nonprofits (and you must be if you’re reading this!) can appreciate this study. It is a pivotal step towards illuminating the power of relationships between funders and grantees, and it is a pivotal step towards helping organizations do their work better, grow, thrive and create a world governed by equality and justice.

Would you like a copy of the study results? Contact anne@datacenter.org for more information!

*Note: Slight changes were made to this article to ensure clarity and accuracy.

The experience of leaving your homeland to come to the United States: it is a story that is apart of every family.

For the South Asian Network (SAN), it is something that drives their work everyday. DataCenter partnered with SAN to provide two trainings for workers in “Little India” in Artesia, California. These workers are using participatory research to tell their stories, assess the unique challenges they face and decide how to take action.

Restaurant and retail workers who work on Pioneer Boulevard’s “Little India” shared their stories in SAN’s research and oral history project.  The research explored wages, workplace conditions, barriers to taking action when issues arise and needs for services.

How do they use their stories to create real lasting change? That is where DataCenter’s trainings come in. DataCenter helped South Asian workers on the Pioneer Boulevard Workers’ Rights Committee analyze their knowledge and experiences to develop the revelations above. The DataCenter trainings also helped them strategize how to use this knowledge for change.

When you gain new knowledge, it goes three places

1. Ears: this is information you hear, that makes you think and challenges your thinking
2. Heart: This is knowledge that pulls at your heart strings. It’s emotional. It makes you feel.
3. Hands: this is knowledge that makes you act. You take this information wherever you go and it moves  you to do something.

Participants in the training examined the knowledge they collected. Together, they considered who the different audiences of this knowledge will be. Then through an interactive exercise (pictured above), they considered whether they wanted these audiences to hear, feel, or act on the information. This determined how they delivered the information to that audience.  According to Joyti Chand, Coordinator of the Civil Rights Unit at SAN, “The exercise was interactive and it really helped us connect the different pieces” of our strategy. This skill building “is really going to shape the organization’s work for years to come. It’s going to help them consider the audience whenever they move forward with their organizing.”

We are grateful to you, our supporters, for making training like this possible. The communities we work with are grateful too. As Joyti put it,

“DataCenter has a cool combination of knowledge and the ability to meet the community where it’s at…There are not a lot of resources for communities to do research and leadership development with data. We really fully relied on [DataCenter] to do that. It was such a tremendous help without which it would have been much more difficult.”

The full report from SAN and the Pioneer Boulevard Workers’ Rights Committee will be released in a few months. Stay tuned!

“The only way to truly liberate ourselves is to educate ourselves.”
- Tony Robinson, age 19

Tony developed this belief while he was working with DataCenter as student research-organizer in the Oakland Unified School District. In July, he joined hundreds of other students, educators and activists at the Free Mind, Free People Conference. The theme: “Education is Liberation.”

Tony, a leader in DataCenter’s Da Town Researchers (DTR) program, and Aaron Nakai, advisorand  co-facilitator of DTR, attended the conference to share the powerful student organizing efforts and Participatory Action Research they have led here in Oakland; learn from other youth who are organizing across the country; and explore how they can join forces for national education liberation. The Da Town Researchers project empowers Oakland students to take an active role in their education using Participatory Action Research. All of their past work, as well as their work to come, is possible only with your generous support.

Youth Present at the Free Minds, Free People Conference, July 7-10

You may imagine conferences to be times where you listen to experienced adults share their knowledge. However, at Free Minds, Free People, youth sat on panels, held strategy meetings and shared their own stories. At one workshop, Tony stood up and said,

“We as young people in the United States of America deserve a quality education and we have the right to demand and shape what our education consists of.”

Students and educators shared stories of how they acted on this belief throughout the weekend. For instance, high school teacher Curtis Acosta of Tucson, AZ presented on organizing efforts there to combat their school district’s efforts to—believe it or not— make ethnic studies classes illegal.

In addition to stories of local struggle, there was serious discussion of long-term, national change: The National Student Bill of Rights (NSBR). For Aaron, the element that brought depth and power to the conversation was

“intergenerational conversations between young people and elders who have worked in civil rights, human rights and gender equity for a long time.”

The workshop on the NSBR was the best attended event of the weekend. There, Tony recognized that the work he participated in Oakland on the local student bill of rights and community school standards will play a huge role in developing and organizing support for NSBR. “Da Town Researchers have the opportunity to be one of the leading voices on a national, history-making scale,” said Tony.

In coming weeks, Tony and Aaron will meet with the other Oakland DTR students to decide their next steps for the project.

Stayed tuned for more stories from DTR as they continue to work locally and on NSBR. Said one adult ally that Tony and Aaron met at the conference, “However important you feel that the National Student Bill of Rights is—it is 10 times more important than that.” We at DataCenter agree with that and we hope you do to. Thank you for the continued support of this work!

Read more about Da Town Researchers!

Da Town Researchers is a project in partnership with DataCenter, Oakland Unified School District’s Meaningful Student Engagement and All City Council.

Edie and I want to thank the DataCenter for the wonderful retirement gift of a naturalist tour of our choosing — a visit to the Gulf Coast of Texas at the time of the songbird migration coming across the Gulf of Mexico from the Yucatan Peninsula.  We spent two weeks visiting various migration and wildlife hot spots, from the Rio Grande border with Mexico to San Antonio. In the process we also learned a lot about the complex human and natural history of the region, and capped it off with an unexpected and sobering camping experience in a region being convulsed by a “fracking” boom.

Fred wanted to show you one of the most beautiful birds they saw on the trip: the Magnolia Warbler.

Of the more than 140 species of birds we encountered, the most unusual behavior was that of a red tail hawk catching Mexican free-tail bats as they poured out from a cave by the thousands for their nocturnal feeding on insects. Among many other memorable sights  were dolphins mating, Kemp Ridley sea turtles feeding, and clapper rails leading their chicks to safety ahead of a storm surge.

I’m enjoying more time for hiking and camping, and for visiting with friends and family.  It’s also an opportunity to explore the confluence of  two major interests: faith and social justice.  Shortly before our Texas vacation I was privileged to be the speaker at this year’s endowed lecture at San Francisco Theological Seminary on “Faith and the Common Good.”  The preparation for this reflection, in which speakers are asked to talk about what they do and why they do it, was both daunting and rewarding, encouraging me to further inquiry.

I remain engaged with the DataCenter through both consulting and volunteering on specific projects and enjoy keeping up with the many exciting developments in the organization’s work.

Gratefully yours, Fred

What does research really mean?

Some may ask for “sticky drama and immediate astonishment please — not humdrum research,” but  former DataCenter staff Ryan Pintado-Vertner makes a different point: research is the key behind every great organizing action. He shares this point in a 1998 issue of Ark Magazine, the journal of the National Organizers Alliance.

Read the short article here!

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Communities have a right to know and a right to be heard. End of story. No. We take that back. This is where the story begins.

You’ve seen research and statistics before. Pew Research Center, Stanford, National Institute of Health. “Reputable facts” — one kind of reputable. But, DataCenter has worked with and trained important, powerful, yet often unnoticed, other reputable sources of knowledge. Sources like Indigenous Hawaiians, Immigrant Women, Low-Wage Workers and Survivors of Domestic Violence.

This Spring, DataCenter provided a number of trainings to grassroots groups, in-person and now in webinar form too! The trainings helped participants understand that their personal community knowledge is as legitimate and as powerful as academic/institutional/mainstream/dominant knowledge. Participants also had the opportunity to plan and strategize about a specific research project for their organizations. Through these trainings, real grassroots organizers, working to amplify the cry for change in their communities, gained invaluable resources for their movement-building work.

At a training hosted by the Hawai’i People’s Fund, 30 leading organizers and activists attended and learned about strategic ways of using research to support key indigenous, environmental, anti-militarism, and gay rights campaigns taking place throughout Hawai’i. Participant Malia Akutagawa of Sustainable Molokai’i thanked DataCenter for “conveying the power that can be found in data and the ways we can create greater equity for our communities through research.”

In addition to learning about how to do organizing work better, Maura King said her experience at the Partnership for Immigrant Leadership and Action (PILA) training resonated with “thoughts and experiences in my life where knowledge and information had been sequestered, held precious and required fluency in academic language. This training helped me put those observations into a broader context, and provided a framework for a way that people can do things differently.” Maura was so inspired by the training that she is now interning with DataCenter’s new training department!

DataCenter has also begun doing webinars. The first was to a number of grantees working on domestic and community violence issues through the Transforming Communities: Technical Assistance, Training & Resource Center. This new form of technology helped us speak to ___ people at once about Research Justice. One participant said that DataCenter’s ethic about community voice has inspired her to “encourage our participants to craft their own story creating pride in who they are.”

Stay tuned to hear about more recent trainings with food workers and immigrant farm workers!

Is your community looking for ways to harness your knowledge and experiences for change? We can help! Call us to schedule a training at 510-835-4692 xt. 310