Community-Based Research
The State of the State for Washington Latinos is an ongoing program at Whitman College in Community-Based Research. Doing “community-based” research (CBR) means that each student collaborates with a community partner whose professional work centrally involves the Latino community. For example, we have partnered two times with Commitment to Community, a neighborhood-based organization seeking to improve civic engagement and neighborhood public resources in Walla Walla. Another partner has been Mario Paredes, the Executive Director of CONSEJO, which offers counseling and referral services for domestic violence and mental health in multiple Washington State locations. Joaquin Avila, former president of MALDEF and now law professor at Seattle University, advises our voting rights projects.
The signature innovation in this project has been our ambitious and systematic program of public outreach. We exercise special leadership in this area with the national network of colleges and universities participating in the Learn & Serve grant that funds our project. Our State of the State students and partners take the research to policy makers, media representatives, organization leaders, and ordinary community residents. These outreach activities seek to enhance the culture of democracy and to catalyze public policies that promote social and political equality. Making these ventures succeed means methodically equipping students with the skills they need to communicate effectively and to elicit active responses in a diverse set of venues, whether in the chambers of state legislators, at a gathering for immigrant families at a pizza restaurant, in the studio at a community radio station, or on stage in front of an audience of hundreds. They need to learn how to speak confidently in languages other than English, how to “read” the particular needs of specific audiences and make on-the-spot adjustments, how to work as a team, how to integrate visual and oral appeals, and how to interact spontaneously with their listeners in ways that both educate and motivate.
• The idea is that the student’s research meets a real, practical need of the partner’s organization – it gives them new knowledge and better equips them to do the work they do. That might mean getting more city support for a neighborhood improvement project here in Walla Walla. Or it might mean helping a non-partisan group figure out the best ways to register more Latinos to vote and turn them out on Election Day.
• But we also have a greater ambition: to spur public, democratic debate about the challenges Latinos face in this state, and to get government officials, other leaders, and the public to take these issues seriously and work on solving some persistent problems.
• And so, for instance, our state legislators from here in the 16th District say that they really rely on the work of Whitman students for accurate information and sound analysis of health issues facing Latinos. Or there’s the case of Sunnyside, where the city council switched from at-large to district elections after a Whitman researcher found that the at-large system was unfair: it made it virtually impossible for Latinos to elect one of their own, and probably discouraged Latinos from even coming to the polls.
• The State of the State for Washington Latinos has been funded in 2008 and 2009 through a nationally competitive federal Learn & Serve grant administered by the Community-Based Research initiative at Princeton University, and by Whitman College. We succeeded in winning this “innovation” grant, in particular, because of (1) the empirical rigor and analytical sophistication we expect in our students’ research; and (2) our precedent-setting agenda for conducting public outreach about the research.
