Within the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life exists a unique collection of professors, community organizers and students who gather through the Tisch College Community Research Center(TCRC). The TCRC’s approach to research involves the community being studied in all aspects of the research.
David Gibbs, executive director of theCommunity Action Agency of Somerville and a member of the TCRC Steering Committee, discussed how typical approaches in academia and research are often too removed from the people they are studying.
“It's very much an outsider looking at and making judgments about a community,” Gibbs said. “Community-centered research turns that inside out and says, you know, let's study ourselves. What are the questions that matter to us as a community? And let's work together to find those answers.”
Gibbs discussed a project that featured his organization, the Community Action Committee of Somerville, which is ananti-poverty organization that does work across the city.
“We were approached by Laurie Goldman, a professor at Tufts, and she wanted to look at questions of displacement … and talk about our study of how people were being displaced from their homes as a result of gentrification.”
According to Gibbs, the project exemplified the difference between traditional academia and the community-centered research of TCRC because it relied on partnerships with community organizers and local residents to collect data.
“A traditional academic approach might be to study city tax records and land records and draw conclusions from that data,” Gibbs said. “[Goldman’s] approach was to put together a group of community organizations and local residents to come up with a set of questions, a survey tool, and then to fund local people to go around and administer that survey tool to their friends and neighbors.”
Gibbs spoke to the importance of involving the community in that research project and how it added value to the study.
“There was an opportunity for people to share their stories directly about how gentrification was affecting them,” Gibbs said. “We certainly got hard data on the numbers of people having to move ... but we also got the surrounding human element of it much more richly than I think we would have otherwise.”
Elaine Donnelly, director of the TCRC, discussed the history and the scope of the TCRC, which first started awarding grants in the 2008–09 academic year. The center has given out nearly $250,000 in grants since then, according to Donnelly.
“[The grants] go to projects that are co-led by community partners, faculty and students, predominantly in our neighboring communities, such as Somerville, Medford, Chinatown, Boston Fenway and in the Grafton-Worcester area,” Donnelly said.
Donnellyalso spoke to the role of students in TCRC. This semester TCRC awarded three “micro” grants to students who are studying working on early STEM education, disparities in end-of-life care and learning with formerly incarcerated individuals. Students held a Zoom presentation over the summer on the lessons learned from their community-centered research. Donnelly discussed this summer’s student presentation and the importance of student research.
“This summer, we piloted the presentation of student research projects over Zoom,” Donnelly said. “[We wanted] to raise the visibility of this community-engaged research of students. And at this time, we wanted to highlight that research itself is a kind of activism where people are really engaged and want to make change. Research is not always in the lab, it’s in the world.”
She continued by saying that the TCRC wants to attract more students who are already engaged or want to be engaged in community-centered research.
“We're looking … to have monthly sessions with a student moderator and student presentations that focus on community research. We want to raise the visibility of it and get students thinking about research, particularly when they're earlier on [in] their college career,” Donnelly said.
According to Donnelly, the TCRC is also different from other community-centered research projects at other universities because it attempts to create lasting connections with communities through an institutional framework, instead of solely relying on individual relationships.
“There is a lot of good community-based participatory research [at other universities]. But generally, it’s on more of an individual basis, where you have faculty partners and community partners who have developed these long-term relationships,” Donnelly said. “TCRC is trying to build infrastructure around that, instead of it being individual and ad hoc.”
Donnelly continued by describing the process for giving out seed grants and the role of the Steering Committee, which facilitates faculty and community partnerships to produce community-centered research.
“Each seed grant requires a Tufts faculty member, and we go through every single department for interested faculty ... The other key piece is the community partner,” Donnelly said. “We have a director of community partnerships, a person who has extensive connections ... throughout Eastern Massachusetts. We leveraged her connections as well as our Steering Committee, which is about 15 people, half of which are community partners.”
Penn Loh, a member of the Steering Committee and a professor in the Department of Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, discussed how he became involved with the TCRC as a community organizer.
“I was on the community side before coming to teach. I was the director of a community-based environmental justice organization based in Roxbury for about 13 years and did a lot of work with different universities,” Loh said.
Loh described some of the issues with university and community partnerships that he experienced while part of the Roxbury environmental justice organization. According to Loh, some of the issues were related to the way the institution is set up.
“Students have courses they have to take, and they're on a semester schedule. They might do something really awesome with you for a semester, and then they're gone ... Or they come and do a project with you in the summer, and then they turn over,” Loh said.
Loh also described issues that would arise because of the way the research is funded and the disconnect between universities and community organizations.
“So many universities that would call us up and say, ‘Hey, we need a community partner for this grant that we're going for. It's due next week, would you like to partner?’” Loh said. “I always said to them, ‘Unless I already know you, and we already have a working relationship, why don't we just have a meeting to get to know each other first.’ Unfortunately, the folks who called with that in mind never called back. But … Tufts was always different.”
According to Loh, TCRC is an organization that tries to avoid these issues by bringing together students, professors and community organizers. He spoke to his experience on the Steering Committee, which allows people to build relationships with each other.
“Being part of the Steering Committee means that I’m not just working with people in my own department. I'm getting to meet people who are working across all the different schools as well as students on our Steering Committee. We also are getting to know all kinds of community partners,” Loh said.
Loh discussed how his relationship with TCRC has incentivized him to stay at Tufts.
“Part of the reason I'm at Tufts and have stayed for so long, is because I've had an opportunity at Tufts to really create the kind of university partner that I always wanted when I was on the community side,” Loh said.
