2007

Reclaiming Research Camp

by Anna Couey & miho kim

Photos: Celia Davis

DataCenter convened our first-ever two-day intensive Reclaiming Research Camp in August for organizers and community leaders in the Bay Area and Central Valley. Twenty participants from youth, criminal justice, economic justice and environmental justice movements learned how research can empower community and support campaigns, and are bringing tools and skills back to their communities to strengthen organizing and develop expert researchers ‘on the ground.’ The research camp provided an important forum for concrete skill-sharing and for strategic conversation about the role of research in organizing and movement building, and is a key strategy to advance DataCenter’s goal to build research capacity and skills at the grassroots.

This historic event was designed as a pilot, so that the experience of it could inform our subsequent convenings in 2008 and beyond. DataCenter has determined that this academy-type venue is crucial in ensuring that community members and organizers have a dedicated space to focus on learning and sharing experience about research as an explicit strategy and agenda for building the social justice movement.

The Research Camp featured a forum on reframing research. We looked at how our social structure validates research produced by people and institutions with power, while typically discounting or appropriating knowledge that resides in communities about social conditions. We talked about how to source, produce and packaged information to be authoritative, depending on your organizing goal to mainstream and community-based audiences. And we explored alternative strategies of using information for movement building, and ways that the power structure uses disinformation and other strategies to weaken movements.

The “Ask the Experts” panel and conversation was a key event, highlighting the expertise Bay Area leaders and organizers who use research strategically in organizing shared powerful stories about the impact of research on their social justice campaigns.

Flor Gutierrez, a member of Mujeres Unidas y Activas, described how the Household Workers Coalition’s participatory worker survey supported organizing and solidarity as workers saw that their individual experiences reflected industry conditions, and provided data used in a California legislative effort to improve working conditions for household workers and published in the Behind Closed Doors report. Organizer Andrea Cristina Mercado noted that following the project, MUA has community-based research as a standard part of their process of campaign development.

Jaron Browne spoke about POWER’s research into how the technical, English-only tobacco warning labels fail to communicate the health impacts of smoking to communities of color, and how their report on the issue and recommended solutions has propelled federal legislation and challenged tobacco activists to factor race and class in their analysis and solutions.

Re’Anita Burns of Youth United for Community Action talked about the group’s campaign to win a community benefits agreement in East Palo Alto, and how background research on a developer is helping the group to strategize and negotiate.

Hamdiya Cooks described All Of Us Or None’s efforts to end discrimination against people who have been incarcerated, and how statistics helped legitimize their issues, motivate policymakers, educate organizers and community members, and win multiple victories in their Ban the Box campaign to remove the requirement for felony disclosure from the first stage of public employment job applications.

The Research Camp also featured workshops on participatory research and strategic campaign research, which offered concrete skills development through hands-on practice developing survey questions to draw out information necessary to effectively advance grassroots campaigns, creating effective search strings, as well as tips on accessing public records (including email) and researching corporations. Participants also developed preliminary guidelines about how to ensure participatory research is truly community-led and owned.

The research camp was a success and a learning experience for all. Participants learned from each other as well, sharing research expertise, stories, projects and ideas with each other. We look forward to incorporating the recommendations and experiences of the participants of this pilot initiative as we develop and host our next research camp!

We are walking away with plenty of invaluable feedback and lessons from the amazing two days we spent together. But we were hardly alone in walking away excited. One participant, echoed by many others, said “I can’t wait to apply this information as soon as I get back!”

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miho kim and Anna Couey are Information Activists at DataCenter.