Valuing assets in community-led action research
/This article was featured in the SCDC Weekly - 1st May 2024.
We’ve featured community-led action research in past issues, and we think it’s an approach that has huge potential. It can shift the balance of power so that communities can use research to set their priorities and carry out the actions they want to see.
One of the key things to think about when taking this approach is what ‘assets’ the community has already and how they can contribute to the research.
A community’s assets are the existing strengths of people and communities, and it’s what can make community-led action research so valuable. Through conducting their own research, people in communities can use their lived experience and unique insights to contribute to what we know about an issue.
Done well, this way of working can also support the building of skills, knowledge, experience, and ideas for the benefit of the research, and the community as a whole. Examples show community-led action research has value as a process itself, along with the research that results.
We’re bringing together some of the people who are working around community-led action research and other participative research methods, to discuss where we are now, with the aim of bringing forward a set of recommendations about what could come next.
We’ll have more to share soon, and we’ll continue to set out our view that community-led action research is an idea whose time has come.
What you need to know this week.
The SCDC Weekly gives you everything you need to know around community development and beyond.
It’s free, concise and delivered directly to your inbox every Wednesday.