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Guiding Principle

Research ↔ Practice

Research isn’t relevant in a vacuum – it has to support people who can make use of it. We do nearly all our work in close partnership with practitioners and organizations serving practitioners. By design, the research and practice constantly inform one another. Compiling and translating others’ research alongside our own ensures that we’re not reinventing the wheel. We involve practitioners throughout the research process and work closely with them to interpret and communicate findings and implications in an accessible format.

Guiding Principle

Building Capacity

We seek to empower partners and colleagues with the knowledge to make informed decisions about how they engage with their communities. To do so, we dedicate time to build the capacity of our partners in useful ways. Capacity building might take the form of workshops for strategic planning or presenting findings, an accessible report that provides actionable recommendations for members of a professional association, or training sessions on how to collect and analyze data. By equipping our colleagues in relevant ways, we ensure that research moves to practice and is integrated directly into their work.

Guiding Principle

Cultural Responsiveness

We approach culture as a way of understanding the world, interpreting reality, and communicating that reality. Culture is at the core of our identities and for our work to be meaningful it has to be shaped in specific and personal ways. Culture is also dynamic, and our commitment to cultural responsiveness is equally so. We adapt our research and evaluation to respond to emerging needs, and we try to surface participants' authentic experience and priorities. This principle manifests on a collective level in our practice with cultural institutions as they embody ways of being and social purpose.

Guiding Principle

Openness

By openness, we mean transparency and open mindedness to experience and knowledge. We practice this principle by: 1) Sharing our research publicly under Creative Commons through various platforms such as reports, peer review publications, presentations, and other types of digital media so that it is open to a variety of audiences; 2) Bringing in various partners to collaborate on projects; and 3) Seeking alternative perspectives early in the research development process. We continue the dialogue around our research by engaging in peer review. This makes our work stronger and is in keeping with our commitment to sharing our research.

Guiding Principle

Collaboration

Collaboration strengthens our work. It allows us to explore new perspectives, seek direct application, and assess social issues from different angles. The success of our work relies on both internal and external partnerships. Internally, our team works together across projects to bring a variety of perspectives, academic approaches, and disciplinary insights to bear on the issues we study. Externally, we work with like-minded researchers on a variety of topics which both widens and deepens the scope of our studies. We embed ourselves alongside our partners to clearly understand social phenomena and put the knowledge we gain to practical use.

Guiding Principle

Understanding & Responding to Context

As an organization, we strive to make sure our work is true to the authentic, lived experiences of the people and phenomena that we study. Our research is based in real-world practices and structured to capture information on the broader environment in which the communities and issues that we study are situated. We are attentive to the dynamic settings where we work, and get regular input from our partners on important contextual factors. We are transparent about our research capacity and constraints, and constantly learn from the expertise of those most familiar with a given community or issue.

Guiding Principle

Grounded in Theory

Theory provides the structure we use to ask, answer, and interpret social science questions. It allows us to make connections between what we learn and what is already known, and enables us to make predictions and test them. As an organization, we come from different theoretical backgrounds and worldviews; consistently discussing our assumptions is fruitful for our work. As we develop protocols, research instruments, and analytic approaches, we look across our disciplines to ground this work in literature already built by generations of scientists.

Guiding Principle

Presence

We believe offering our embodied presence and undivided attention is one of the strongest ways to acknowledge the value of all individuals we work with. How we engage with our partners fundamentally impacts the success of our work. We practice this principle in several ways. In our partnerships, we nurture a culture of being attentive to the spirit of our collaborative efforts and present to partners’ research needs and goals. This approach involves consistently revisiting project goals, along with regular check-ins with our collaborators.

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Research ↔ Practice

Building Capacity

Cultural Responsiveness

Openness

Collaboration

Understanding & Responding to Context

Grounded in Theory

Presence