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When you hear survey statistics in the news do you ever wonder: who’s out in the field asking people questions and collecting this data?

Perhaps you imagine someone in a cubicle making cold-calls or maybe a college student going door-to-door carrying a clipboard.

This may be a method for some agencies, but when you hear survey results from DataCenter this is what you can imagine: someone from a community, talking to people they know, and asking questions they’ve helped develop. As DataCenter’s National Domestic Workers Survey project continues to move forward, you can imagine a Latina, Cambodian or Trinidadian woman, who, after learning how training to conduct a survey, will be out collecting real stories so that women from this largely isolated and misunderstood workforce can use their experiences to acquire the basic labor rights they deserve. Thank you for joining with DataCenter as we gather community-based research, and currently embark on one of the key steps in any research project: training our domestic worker surveyors.

As of this post, we have conducted a Training for Trainers in New York, and are currently leading one in Los Angeles.

Check out our Facebook for daily updates and photos!

Now you’re wondering, what is a “Training for Trainers”?
We have gathered together domestic workers who speak Spanish, Tagalog, Haitian Creole and 6 other languages that domestic workers speak. After a four day training, these women will then go back to their home communities, and train others to conduct the survey as well. In this way, we can efficiently train surveyors in 13 cities across the United States.

Now you’re wondering, what will they need to learn? First, the participants will learn about who they will be surveying. DataCenter is using census data to inform the demographics of those we seek to survey. Surveys will be collected according to occupation and race/ethnicity. For example, if in San Francisco 60% of the workers are housekeepers then 60% of the 150 surveys will come from housekeepers.

How will they find people to survey? DataCenter will also provide the participants with the space and the tools to create specialized outreach strategies. They will be learning tips and methods from each other as well.

In addition to generating powerful, national data about the working and living conditions of domestic workers across the country, this survey will help local organizations that support domestic workers increase their base. This is key: as domestic workers meet each other and learn each others’ stories, they can find comfort in their shared experiences, build relationships and build a groundswell of support for the rights of domestic workers from state to state and across the country. We look forward to bringing their stories to you as well, so we can work in solidarity with them for lasting social change.

Read stories of Household workers in California (2007).
Read stories of Domestic Workers in New York state (2006).

The Academy, including universities and research institutions, is designed to share its knowledge with the outside world, but how does information travel in the other direction? You are a part of that transmission of information. You help bring community voice to the Academy.

A major goal of “research justice” is to bring research equity to the world the Academy. One way DataCenter is fulfilling that goal is through presentations in college classes. College students learn the time-tested classics of research, policy and social science in school. DataCenter strengthens that classical understanding by bringing community-based research to the classroom. DataCenter conducted recent talkss at USC, Antioch, and a City College of SF. We discussed how research can be a tool to support social change and best practices as researchers working with communities.

Said a student from Antioch college,

“I loved how [the trainer] challenged the idea of research and brought out the idea of community research, gathering wisdom from the people in our communities.”

Adjunct Professor Barbara Osborn at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Southern California calls on DataCenter to talk at the beginning of every semester for her “Research, Practice and Social Change” class.

“DataCenter has distilled the community based research process like nobody else and put it in popular education frameworks that are incredibly accessible. They’ve got great tools for newbie researchers struggling to clarify research projects with first-time community partners.”

Joani Marinoff of City College San Francisco described how

“The perspective [DataCenter] represents based on real CBPR and the concept of research justice in the field is invaluable and really makes tangible anything I can present as their instructor.”

DataCenter welcomes any opportunity to share the community voice with the academic world. You know that by working across the nonprofit sector, the political sector and the academic sector, real lasting justice can be brought to life.

Want to schedule a training with your class or organization? Contact Saba: saba@datacenter.org

Last month, DataCenter trained 40 people in San Francisco and Los Angeles.  The participants came from various fields including public health, organizing, academia, social services and policy advocacy.  In Los Angeles, we partnered with Mujeres Unidas y Activas (MUA) at the The California Wellness Foundation convening of their work and health grantees and guided participants through the research planning and strategizing process.  The audience was especially energized by MUA staff Claudia Reyes and Juana Flores who laid out in detail how they were able to design the survey instruments, train members, implement the survey and conduct analysis and then transfer that data into an effective organizing strategy.  Similarly, in San Francisco, we provided a half day training on research and planning through CompassPoint.  We had good discussions on ways that data could tell a community’s story.   These trainings have emerged out of years of creating and improving curricula that can simply outline the basics in research planning but more importantly, guide in picking methods strategically so that the information is being leveraged in the most powerful way.

DataCenter and Multicultural Alliance for a Safe Environment (MASE) partnered in late 2009 to bring 12 young people together for an Indigenous Knowledge and Research Justice Camp.  The 2-day camp was the first step in building a network of young people that can participate in and eventually lead the current uranium battles, offering their skills and talents as politically-oriented organizers, artists, and performers.

We explored the different realms of knowledge: mainstream knowledge, experiential knowledge, and traditional and grassroots knowledge.  We discussed how community, experienced, and traditional grassroots knowledge provide a person with a stable foundation, whereas mainstream knowledge doesn’t.  Community, traditional, grassroots, and experienced knowledge make you who you are and are necessary to continue community life.  Ideas and lessons that come from the earth are time-tested and more foundational.  Oftentimes, mainstream knowledge distracts us from what is really important, for instance, how does Paris Hilton really affect our lives?  Mainstream knowledge can serve a good purpose and share information that everyone should have access to and know in order to and build a common awareness.  Knowledge can come from multiple communities and be shared.

One of the most memorable moments from the camp was when participants were asked to draw their life story on a single piece of paper and how uranium mining has impacted their lives.  Every participant had a personal story to share on how uranium mining continues to impact our lives, from having a family member that used to work in the mines, from seeing old mining equipment abandoned in their communities, to having family members that have gotten sick and passed on from uranium contamination.

Working on uranium issues, it is clear that policy-makers and those in power usually only value information that comes from western science.  Numbers, statistics, data, western science, and written documents make knowledge “valued.”  In our communities, our knowledge is not always documented in these ways and is usually not considered acceptable or relevant.  We also decided that the value of knowledge goes up as you need it (i.e. in the woods a computer isn’t valuable at all, whereas traditional knowledge would be more important).

We decided to do a video project that will challenge these ideas and help us reclaim and document our community’s knowledge so that we can share it with others.  As our training camp ended, our participants walked away with flip cameras and tapes to continue to build upon the lessons of the training even after the training ended.  Participants are free to choose to create a video diary in which they share thoughts, insight, and ideas that arise after the training session has ended; or interview friends, family members, and others in order to document the knowledge that already exists in our communities; or to use on our group project, a film project that explores how uranium continues to affect the lives of our families and communities.  After collecting video, participants will send their cameras and tapes to organizers for processing and editing.  The final product will be a video that can be used to upload to YouTube, to send to legislators to educate them on the uranium issue, and to be put on Ch 27, the local TV station.

Coming Soon: a short YouTube video of the Community-Uranium Mining session with Dine Youth!

Nadine Padilla, Coordinator of MASE Coalition, is based in Albuquerque, NM, and is Navajo and Pueblo (Isleta/Laguna) from Bluewater Lake, NM.  For more information about MASE Coaltion, please contact Nadine Padilla at mz.nadine@gmail.com.