Phase One Unwrapped!
As we come to the end of Phase 1, and look ahead to the second phase of the programme starting in this year, here’s a sneak peak at some of our highlights from the past 18 months of the Community Knowledge Matters network.
Community Check-Ins
As network members will know (too well!), we like to start each session together asking people what ‘hats’ they are coming in with and what communities they feel part of. As promised, we have amalgamated all of these ‘check-ins’ throughout the past 18 months and the results are in!
communities
We asked people who attended our network events what communities they felt part of, with the option to define ‘community’ as they liked: whether a community of geography, identity, experience, interest or other!
The bigger the word, the more frequently that word was used and so you can see that our network has strong engagement from the following communities: highland, rural, research, shetland, LGBT, parent, moray, mental health, youth work and community development.
This is based on a total of 656 submissions from those who have engaged with our various network activities over the past 18 months. As such, it gives a snapshot of those who have engaged most with our activities, and doesn’t necessarily represent all the communities in our network but we think it’s a pretty great set of communities to be working with in our midst! Can you see yourself in this?
community ‘hats’
In our way of helping to break down the binaries between ‘communities’ and ‘researchers’, we asked people to “check-in” what extent they were coming into our spaces, meetings and events as: community members, a person with lived experience, a researcher, a practitioner or service provider, or a decision-maker.
The graph below is a representation of all of the ‘community-hats’ exercises carried out through Phase 1 activities, combining to what extent all those who attended events identified with the various descriptions. Crucially people were able to identify with each of the categories on a scale from ‘don’t identify at all’ to ‘strongly identify’, acknowledging that people are able to wear more than one ‘hat’ at any given time. It also encourages a whole-self approach, allowing people to move past their ‘job title’ or status and engage with others in the room through whatever ‘identity’ felt most appropriate to them at the time.
In general, the graph depicts that people have engaged most in our network events through the perspective of their own ‘lived experience’ and identity as a ‘community member’. This chimes both with our aims of being a network for centering community perspectives, as well as our belief that no matter our job titles or status in society, we all have lived experience and are all members of a community in one way or another.
To a slightly lesser extent, the graph shows that most people strongly identify with the label ‘researcher’. Given that only 28% of our network are researchers that are based in higher education institutions, this excites us as it demonstrates that many community members do see themselves as researchers, again breaking down the binaries and supporting our belief that research doesn’t just have to take place in a university but can be led by communities too.
The u-shape for the line representing ‘practitioners’ suggests that quite a lot of people either don’t identify at all with this term, or identify with it to a fairly strong amount. This might mean that people see the term ‘practitioner’ as more of a binary, but also that there might not be a clear understanding of what we mean by this term.
Finally, the graph shows that most people don’t identify with the term ‘decision-maker’ at all, and only a very small number of people do. Again, this could be down to the fact that the term is ambiguous and people aren’t sure how to relate to it, or that people engaging with our network events don’t feel as though they have a huge amount of opportunities for decision-making.
what we’ve learnt from this
People are recognising that they can bring in their different perspectives into the network activities, that there continues to be a centering of communities in our work and that there isn’t a fixed binary between community-members and researchers, or other identities.
It would be useful to think about what we mean by the terms ‘practitioner’ and ‘decision-maker’: do these terms feel universally understood? Are there structural barriers to being able to identify with these terms? Who else should we be bringing into the room?
We will be sharing more learning and evaluation from Phase 1 soon, but in the meantime if you would like to know more about the network or want to discuss anything in particular, please get in touch! We always love hearing from people.
And to find out more for our plans for Phase 2, come along to our next Community of Practice session!