In this season of giving, we want to share with you how the Urban Institute’s impact has grown in 2021. To continue our series this week, we’ll give you a glimpse into our work this year through the voices of those who help develop our research and those who use it to shape their own endeavors. We hope you enjoy!
Dear Friend,
In graduate school, Urban Institute senior research associate Eona Harrison learned how to conduct research on women’s sexual and reproductive health decisions and experiences. But with every lecture she heard, with every report she wrote, her gut nagged at her. She personally knew another side of women’s lived experience, and it wasn’t being captured through the traditional research process.
“I always felt I would gain better insights by partnering with communities that either I’m a part of or interested in working with,” says Eona, a demographer whose work focuses on women, adolescents, and community resilience. “I just don’t feel researchers can draw conclusions about people’s lives—whatever their goal is—if we haven’t really, truly engaged them in the process.”
Most recently for Eona, that means collaborating with teenagers at a Washington, DC, public housing community to design, carry out, and learn from an innovative sexual health and safety program. Or working with East Baltimore residents to develop their capacity to conduct high-quality research and identify solutions to challenges they’re facing in their quickly gentrifying neighborhood.
Like Eona, a growing number of Urban researchers are conducting
research that centers the expertise of the people and communities
at the heart of the issues we study—intentionally including their input in how we identify problems, shape questions, analyze data, develop insights, and recommend policy solutions. It’s rigorous research with a community, rather than on a community.
Such an approach shifts traditional power dynamics. It better positions communities to create the change they envision. That change is often more enduring, too.
“It is stronger,” Eona says, “if it’s from a people, for its people.”
