Participatory Research
Participatory Research
Participatory research is a core pillar of the Office of Community Collaboration’s work. Participatory research prioritizes community voices and experiences in shaping research agendas and methodologies and engages diverse stakeholders, including community members, organizations, and academic researchers, as equal partners throughout the research process.
By focusing on addressing pressing community concerns and interests, participartory research produces accessible, high-quality research findings that can inform policy and practice, using formats such as policy briefs, short reports, and visual representations.
OCC respects and incorporates local community culture and ways of doing things, and utilizes a mix of qualitative and quantitative methods to capture both personal stories and statistical data, ensuring a comprehensive understanding of community issues.
Participatory Research Projects
Cities Mentoring Program
Cities Mentoring Program
School of Public Health (SPH)
PI: David DuBois, Professor in Community Health Sciences
This project is a collaboration between DePaul University, Loyola, Northwestern University and the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). The UIC component of the research involved implementation of a preventative intervention in three Chicago Public Schools (CPS) in the North Lawndale area as well as serving as the hub for study design and data analysis.
The Cities Mentoring Program provides weekly afterschool sessions through the academic year at partner schools. Graduate students facilitate an evidence-based, trauma-informed skill-building curriculum while undergraduate students provide 1:1 mentoring to the participating CPS students. Approximately 20 undergraduates and five graduate students have served as mentors and program facilitators annually.
The program impacted Chicago Public School sites in Austin, Brighton Park, Bronzeville, Greater Lawndale, and South Shore. Importantly, the Cities Mentors Program is designed with critical anti-racist and ethnic studies focused frameworks. Participating university students operated from a place of understandings of their own trajectories and the work necessary to create and utilize curricula that invite students, families, and communities into shared learning experiences.
Transport Equity Workshop
Transport Equity Workshop
The Urban Planning and Policy
PI: Dr. Kate Lowe
This Project combined seminar style activities with a community-based project analyzing the Chicago Transit Authority bus route 82 (Kimball-Homan) in North Lawndale. Dr. Kate Lowe instructed the course, and support from the Office of Community Collaboration enabled critical elements of partnership and public dissemination. Students, who were both undergraduates and graduate students, took a bus tour with the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society that highlighted the rich history of the neighborhood, structural disinvestment, and a range of important assets and amenities. Community partners from the Transportation Committee of the North Lawndale Community Coordinating Council and Equiticity advised on the project throughout.
The student report adopted a mobility justice frame that explained that current 82 bus service does not adequately address structural inequities or provide equivalent access to critical services. The report noted important destinations in North Lawndale, but showed disinvestment, higher rates of disabilities and lower rates of remote work. Their bus stop audit showed inadequate bus conditions and discussed challenges, like a high vulnerability to heat with climate change. The assessment of bus frequency and reliability looked at local system-wide benchmarks, as well as national public transit agency peers, demonstrating a need for substantial improvements in reliability. Students recommended further research include perspectives from operators to enhance reliability and that future investments improve waiting conditions, including more tree coverage. Funding facilitated a lunch event at which students presented their work, and attendees included neighborhood leaders, transportation advocates, and CTA senior leaders.
Food is Medicine
Food is Medicine in the Neighborhood: South Shore Report
Population Health Nursing Science
Saria Lofton, Assistant Professor
We held the cooking classes at Bryn Mawr Community Church as we have an established relationship with them. in the training kitchen managed by Greater Auburn Gresham Development Corporation, which is also co-located with MSHC Auburn Gresham clinic and the UIC Neighborhood Center in Auburn Gresham, whom we will be coordinating with for this program.
We worked with Chef Ken Polk and OCEAN-HP, who has a nutrition program for communities led by Orrin Williams. The sessions were about 2-3 hours long. The cooking component was organized and led by Chef Polk, and the nutrition session afterwards was organized by OCEAN-HP. The participants would cook with chef and then eat while discussion nutrition with a focus on the DASH eating plan. The participants were then provided fresh produce bags with recipes after the class. The coordination of the class was led by my community partner, Amena Karim and three to four students that ranged from undergraduates to medical students.
Community Curriculum Project
The Community Curriculum Project, Phase 1 (Seed Grant)
College of Education Curriculum & Instruction/Education
PI: Victoria F. Trinder, Ph.D.
The Community Curriculum Project, Phase I (seed grant), supported by UIC’s Office of Community Collaboration Neighborhood Centers Teaching funding established the foundation for a community-centered ethnic studies curriculum thread through the BA in Urban Education program.
This initial phase supported program development work with faculty and students necessary to grow community participation in our urban teacher education program. With the excitement of enriching partnerships with the schools and communities served by the BA in Urban Education program through the creation of a curriculum development project with the two community centers collaborating with UIC’s Neighborhood Initiatives office, the CCP piloted exciting new instructional modules with students; organized faculty, doctoral students, undergraduate students, and staff from CPS’s Office of Teaching and Learning; and responded to community and student input regarding the structure of BAUE pre-professional coursework.
Through these innovations, the Community Curriculum Project embraced the mission and vision of the UIC Neighborhood Initiatives framework and created an initial phase of a comprehensive three-phase sequence of community inquiry that would center community knowledges in the learning and subsequent teaching of undergraduate students in the Department of Curriculum & Instruction in the College of Education.
Community Engaged Teaching
Community Engaged Teaching
School of Public Health/Communities Health Sciences
PI: Jeni- Hebert-Beirne, Professor in Community Health Sciences
This grant provided funds to support a graduate public health course CHSC 594: Scholarly Community Engagement that is co-taught by a community instructor and is aligned with the NIOSH-funded Center for Health Work’s Greater Lawndale Healthy Work project, a community-based participatory research project. The GLHW Community Council members were guest lecturers and guest class members. Most of the classes were open to the public and held at the Odehmenen Center for Health Equity.
Our class participated in an asset-based, historical community health worker-led neighborhood bus tour of North Lawndale. The tour concluded at the UIC Lawndale Neighborhood Center. Khameron Townsend-Riley hosted the class where students, community leaders and UIC administration deepened their understanding of work as a social determinant of health at the neighborhood level by playing the Loteria a worker justice themed educational game. See the link below for more.
Urban Studies Capstone
Urban Studies Capstone Project
Urban Planning and Policy
PI: Keisha Farmer-Smith PhD, LSW
The UIC Department of Urban Planning and Policy requires all graduating BA in Urban Studies students to complete the capstone project. This course gives students the opportunity to work on practical problems and to apply their new skills to work with local organizations. The Capstone course requires students to apply their learning in a real-world work setting.
Capstone projects are learning in action. The Capstone provides graduating students in Urban Studies at UIC with experiences that allow them to integrate classroom learning with a relevant problem-solving experience in a professional work situation. Over the course of one semester students work in teams to address urban issues, organizational challenges, identify opportunities for a community partner organization, conduct research on a pressing management issue, and analyze data. Capstone projects contribute to students’ professional training, offer organizations the opportunity to access student expertise, and strengthen the relationships between UIC and organizations around the city, state, and region.
Teaching Grant
Urban Renewal and the Archives course
UIC Renewal Team
PI: Elizabeth Todd-Breland
UIC’s contribution to The Renewal Project—a national project focusing on the history and ongoing relationship between urban renewal policies, universities, race, class, and displacement across the U.S. Experiential learning is central to the teaching pedagogy. The OCC grant was incredibly important to this end, as it allowed for the students to utilize the UIC Neighborhood Center and explore on a tour of North Lawndale led by Ms. Blanche Killingsworth, leader of the North Lawndale Historical and Cultural Society.
Ms. Killingsworth’s tour connected students’ readings about Martin Luther King Jr.’s time in Chicago and the organizing of the Contract Buyers’ League to relevant historical sites in the community. Ms. Killingsworth also introduced students to longtime organizers and significant contemporary institutions in the community.
This experience impacted students’ understandings of local histories of race, displacement, inequality, and community building that shaped their culminating project—a student-produced public-facing website. Click the link below for more.