check out the reports from our “storied communities, community stories” project
The Community Opportunity Alliance contracted ThirdSpace to lead a research project to explore the role of resident voice in community development - how residents engage in community development today, how they'd like to engage in the future, and the things that the sector could do to support that stronger participation. We partnered with literary artists and community-based development organizations (CBDOs) and interviewed more than 50 residents in four communities across the country.
¿Usted quiere leer los materiales del proyecto en español? El resumen informativo está disponible en español aquí. El informe de datos y metodología está disponible aquí. Y la guía de conversación está disponible aquí.
In the Storied Communities, Community Stories Issue Brief, ThirdSpace highlights key findings from the resident interview process, as well as recommendations for how community development can support increased resident voice in their work moving forward.
In the Storied Communities, Community Stories Data + Methodology Brief, ThirdSpace does a deep dive on the research approach, as well as limitations of the current project, and recommendations for further resident research in the future.
In the Storied Communities, Community Stories Conversation Guide, ThirdSpace offers a framework for additional community dialogue around resident voice, including specific prompts for residents, CBDOs, and organizations that support CBDOs.
Check out the reportS from our Anti-Racist Community Development research project
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF) contracted ThirdSpace Action Lab to lead a research project to increase understanding of how structural racism shows up in the community development sector
and to begin to identify specific ways to increase the sector’s embrace of explicitly anti-racist approaches in order to achieve health equity. The project is grounded in a large-scale literature review and a set of interviews with a broad range of community development practitioners.
ThirdSpace teamed up with Storytellers for Change to unpack the eleven dominant community development narratives uncovered in the Anti-Racist Community Development research. In this document, Storytellers for Change provides a step-by-step resource for practitioners that want to translate those findings into action-oriented narrative strategy in their own work.
In this document, ThirdSpace provides a high-level overview of what the research demonstrates about why focusing on racism in community development matters; what dominant narratives are underpinning racism in the sector; how structural racism specifically manifests; and what a more explicit, more affirmative anti-racist approach might look like.
In this document, ThirdSpace provides a high-level overview of the core characteristics of community development; how different sets of actors support this work; and what the research tells us about pathways for influencing community development practice and policy to drive more racially equitable outcomes for communities.
In this document, ThirdSpace provides a high-level overview of the history behind the formalization of the community development sector; how federal policy and grassroots practice have played particularly prominent roles in the field's evolution; and the implications of this history for how we move anti-racist practice forward in community development today.
