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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

MARY HYDE: Hello, and welcome to our grantee dialogue. Our third day, and we are so excited that 

you've all decided to join us today. My name is Mary Hyde, and I am the director of the 

Office of Research and Evaluation at AmeriCorps. I am a community psychologist by 

training. We are excited for this series, and we sincerely hope that through this dialogue, 

we can all broaden our perspectives, find shared meaning, find places of agreement, 

allow for and invite differences of opinion and experience, and challenge our own and 

others' preconceived notions.

And just as we did yesterday, before continuing with my remarks, I would like to invite two 

colleagues to introduce themselves and to translate what I've just said in their languages. 

With that, I'll turn it over to Lily.

LILY ZANDNIAPOUR: Thank you, Mary. Hi, everyone. My name is Lily Zandniapour, and I'm going to say 

a few words in Farsi, translating what Mary said.

[SPEAKING FARSI]

Thank you. Hoodah

HOODAH HAMDAN: Yes, thank you, Lily. My name is Hoodah Hamdan. I am a sociologist and research 

analyst with the Office of Research and Evaluation and I’ll be translating what Mary just 

said in Arabic. [SPEAKING ARABIC] Thank you.

MARY HYDE: Thank you, Lily and Hoodah.] The ideas and research our panelists will share today are a 

culmination of two decades of systematic inquiry into civic engagement sponsored by this 

agency. Following the tragedy of 9/11, the agency initiated a survey research program in 

partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau. Surveys on volunteering and other forms of 

civic engagement generated national statistics on the percentage of Americans who 

report participating in the civic life of their communities. These nationally representative 

statistics remain a cornerstone of our research program. After a decade of administering 

these national surveys, the Agency partnered with the National Academy of Sciences.

The National Research Council convened a panel on measuring social and civic 

engagement and social cohesion in surveys. The consensus study report, titled "Civic 

Engagement and Social Cohesion, Measuring Dimensions of Social Capital to Inform 

Policy," included several recommendations for advancing scholarship in this field of study 

and increasing the utility of research findings for improving community conditions.

One of the panel recommendations was to conduct research using methods and 

measures capable of capturing a more contextualized understanding of civic engagement 

and community change. The report suggests that the need to supplement survey 

research with additional approaches for understanding this constellation of behaviors and 

their implications for transforming lives and communities. In response, the agency 

launched a research grant program in 2015 to do just that.

The panelists assembled for this week's dialogue, including today, will share what they've 

learned through this research grant program. The panels represent academic and citizen 

expertise. We invite each of you to share your expertise and lived experience so we can 

collectively create research-informed and innovative solutions for some of our toughest
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

community challenges. I again invite Lily and Hoodah to translate my last remark in their 

languages.

LILY ZANDNIAPOUR: Thank you, Mary. [SPEAKING FARSI] Thank you. Hoodah? 

HOODAH HAMDAN: [SPEAKING ARABIC] Thank you.

MARY HYDE: Thank you both, and thank you all for joining us today. So, let's get going.

KATY HUSSEY-SLONIKER: So thank you Mary, [? Hoodah, ?] and Lily for the wonderfully inspiring 

introduction remarks. My name is Katy Hussey-Sloniker, and I'm the learning officer for 

the Office of Research and Evaluation. Unfortunately, Melissa is having technical issues 

and is unable to moderate. I have the pleasure of kicking off the first session today 

focused on the Office of Research and Evaluation grantees: rising up to the challenge of 

conducting research and civic engagement in the time of COVID.

Our session will begin with each of our four panelists presenting their work, followed by 

Andrea Roble s moderating discussions on two additional questions, and then break out 

into smaller group settings where you as participants can meet and ask questions of the 

panelists.

So let me introduce our four panelists for today. We have Dawn Jacqueline Murphy from 

Fielding Graduate University, Rachel Wenrick from Drexel University, Marisol ClarkIbáñez from California State University, San Marcos, and Maren King State University of 

New York. Let me introduce our first panelist, Dawn.

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: Hi, everyone. Thank you so much for this opportunity to share what our 

project has done. The Fielding Graduate University part project was called Leading from 

the Roots, and it is a partnership with the U.S. community-based folk schools. Many 

people are not familiar with folk schools, and I'll just give a brief explanation of folk 

schools in North America at this time.

There is a new wave of folk school founding, and folk schools are adult—generally adult 

ed or intergenerational community-based organizations that provide instruction based on 

community need and interest. The majority of folk schools in the new wave of folk school 

founding are looking at traditional skills, heritage arts, and culture-bearing and are alive 

with music, and dance, and craft, and those sorts of areas. And there has been almost a 

nine-fold increase in the number of folk schools in the U.S. since the early 2000s.

The research and the project of Leading from the Roots was looking at these folk schools 

as centers where craftspeople and culture-bearers could come together and look at civic 

engagement and social action through their particular and unique skills and connections 

within the community. The two questions that we were asking in this study were, How can 

place-based traditional artists and craftspeople make a positive impact on the regional 

concerns of reducing dependency on external economic drivers and economic vitality and 

resilience in rural communities?

So the schools that are being founded are generally in rural communities, and looking at 

that was a really important aspect. For the first portion of the study, we looked at a 

specific school in the Pacific Northwest, the Arbutus Folk School in Olympia, Washington, 

and its connection to a five-county economic development region called the PAC-5. It is a
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

7,000-square-mile economic development region, and we defined our community as the 

craftspeople in this region.

And that, the project really started out as a collective cooperative process, where we had 

plans on surveying and having large gatherings of craftspeople to do focus groups and to 

gather stories on need and capacity within the arena of economic development. And that 

changed dramatically, as many of the projects probably will share. If you could go to the 

next slide?

So when COVID hit, we had just put out our plan for our research and gotten IRB 

approval. And all of the large gatherings of artists and craftspeople for singing and 

dancing and et cetera were no longer viable options. And so we transitioned to more of a 

co-op, or a collective process, where the individual craftspeople that were involved in the 

project wrote their own plan of research and action within their communities.

And we started with autobiographies of the craftspeople or culture-bearers in their 

locations. And this process was imbued with a sense of loss but also a sense of urgency 

with the needs that were being identified by the craftspeople and culture-bearers within 

their communities. As a result, specific to the Southwestern Washington, we ended up 

with 10 community-based participatory action research plans and projects that were led 

by our heritage artists and craftspeople in their communities. And there, those ranged 

from action research developed around healthy foods and security, an indigenous 

language revitalization project that went online and also was sharing information about 

COVID through these online platforms that didn't exist before there was an Art for 

Immigrants' Rights Project, where normally they would do a march, and they did it 

virtually, which resulted in a direct aid project that raised over $90,000 to help our 

immigrant workers in the area.

We had herbal care projects, including a BIPOC-led community effort around getting 

medicines, herbal medicines, out to our indigenous folks. Crafts survey and directory 

looking to locate craftspeople in the area, and intergenerational mountain dulcimer 

education to fight social isolation that was put online. All of these projects were led by the 

craftspeople, and many of the findings are still coming out.

And we tried to encourage and to provide space for the community members to share 

their findings through participatory video. And so we have a film festival that is coming up 

where the findings and the results and outcomes of the projects will be shared. One of 

the most significant did a 20-minute mini-documentary around the Art for Immigrant 

Rights March and the Solidarity Beyond Charity project that was a result of this.

So the Washington State project was the first phase of this, and the second question that 

we were asking within the research was, What impact does engagement and dialogue 

about participatory action research and, specifically, community-based participatory 

action research, have on the expansion of new folk school scope of service to broader 

civic engagement actions? And so through a third year, we were able to recruit additional 

folk schools around the country, eight different states with nine different schools that are 

currently running participatory action research projects and participatory video processes.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

Again, they're doing this through—they're going to be reporting out their findings through 

video and a participatory video process, and all of those videos are forthcoming. I have, I 

think—I'm not sure if she's here with us today—but we have one of the site coordinators 

for a folk school in Minnesota, which is Marine Mills Folk School, and they have been 

doing a project that is looking at organizational survival as a volunteer-run organization, 

both in the time of COVID and beyond. And I'm wondering if she is here with us today.

Kirsten, are you--

PRESENTER: Hey, Dawn, I'm sorry. If she could answer the questions, because we'll need to wrap.

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: OK, sure, sure, sure. So I mean, that is the essence of our project, with 

findings still coming in. It's a very distributive effort, and it has been from the very 

beginning with a large geographic area that we were attempting to cover, and then 

expanding to the other schools around the country.

PRESENTER: Thank you, Dawn. Now we'll turn it over to Rachel from Drexel University. 

RACHEL WENRICK: Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. Can you hear me?

PRESENTER: Yes, we can.

RACHEL WENRICK: OK, great. All right, wonderful. Wow, guys, thank you for putting our headshots on 

there. I had opted not to do that so that we could have-- I was trying to represent our 

team a little bit more. But I appreciate how you were able to economically use space. So, 

Ayana Allen-Handy, our fearless leader and the PI of this project, is on a plane right now. 

Otherwise, she would be with us, but I'm very happy to represent the team. My name is 

Rachel Wenrick, and I'm the director of Writer's Room, and I'm the co-PI on this project, 

which is called Anti-Displacement: the Untapped Potential of University-Community 

Cooperative Living.

And just very quickly, I will tell you about Writer's Room. We're a university community 

literary arts program, so that means our writers are 18 to 80. It's not an outreach program 

of the university, but everything we do is co-created with our neighbors living in the 

Mantua and Powelton neighborhoods of West Philadelphia, which is a Promise Zone 

community.

So that means we are high school kids and retirees and AmeriCorps service members, 

and we're diverse in just about everywhere you could imagine—age, socioeconomic 

status, religion, sexuality, gender identity. And together, we engage in creative 

placemaking and art for social justice. And all of that means, really, that we use story to 

spur the actions required to create a more equitable world. OK, next slide. Thank you. 

So, our CPAR study is investigating gentrification and displacement in our community in 

West Philadelphia, but what we've learned will likely resonate with many people on this 

call regardless of where you are in the country. We learned that gentrification and 

displacement of Black residents is happening at faster and higher rates than we had 

hypothesized at the onset of the project. For example, in the past 10 years, the white 

population has increased 73 percent in Mantua, compared to only 17 percent in the 

neighboring Powelton Village.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

Affordable housing options are much needed in our community yet are scarce and 

decreasing. Many of our residents are cost burdened. An example of estimated renters in 

a Mantua block group: only 21 percent are considered to be living in affordable housing, 

with their rent being less than 30 percent of their income. The rest are cost burdened— 

rent is more than 30 percent, or extremely cost-burdened—rent is more than 50 percent 

of their income. This is also a marked increase from earlier years.

And the last thing that we are taking a look at, which I'll talk about more in the Q&A, is the 

sharing of stories as a vital connector and source of data during life in lockdown. And 

you'll see here about our project being co-designed. It actually was born of one of our 

founding members being displaced when a developer bought her building and sold it to— 

and it was sold to be flipped to student housing.

And we knew immediately that we were implicated in each other's stories. This was in our 

first season in 2014. And it was wonderful to create art together, but if we were able to 

act to create a community together through story sharing, we wanted to act as a 

community. And this anti-displacement project was born from there. Next slide.

So, in addition to this, more as part of the CPAR study, we are really working on 

collective action as well. And this has been part of—we know the story, basically. As 

universities expand, developers displace residents to rent to students.

And what we're doing is developing a model that offers a different story. It's students, 

recent graduates, and AmeriCorps service members are renting from homeowners and 

become part of an anti-displacement solution while building a stronger community. This 

concept preserves homeownership for long-term African American residents and creates 

opportunities for intergenerational connection. We also see the opportunity to create new 

homeownership through this model.

And so, during the pandemic, we moved into our new home at Ross Commons, which is 

an ADA-accessible building that's located at the edge of our university's campus and on 

the border of our neighboring communities. This is the hub of our public programming 

we'll be launching in the fall, and it will be the anchor house of our cooperative living 

network.

And so, this fall, at the end of our three-year study, we'll be launching the pilot of that 

network. I'm really thrilled to share—I put it in the chats with Melissa—but I'm really 

thrilled to share that just yesterday, we found out from the Bair Foundation that they've 

approved our grant request for $300,000 to support our pilot houses, to support the 

creation of the accompanying arts programming, and also the business plan to scale the 

project with our partners.

And I cannot stress enough how much our CPAR AmeriCorps work helped demonstrate 

the possibility of actionable, equitable solutions that can benefit the larger community. I'm 

getting all emotional; I'm sorry. [LAUGHS] And we really—we hope to work with our 

partners to create a manual for national replication. And a big part of that will be 

examining how place-based art strategies and civic engagement act as drivers of social 

cohesion in our local context and beyond. And I want to end by saying how grateful we
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

are to AmeriCorps for supporting this work and supporting our team and our community. 

Andrea and Melissa and everyone at AmeriCorps, thank you so much.

PRESENTER: So I'm not sure, Rachel, if you're looking at the [INAUDIBLE], the chat that's going on 

around you, but everyone is sending you tons of congratulations. It's been incredibly 

exciting, incredibly.

RACHEL WENRICK: We can't thank you guys enough. The support from AmeriCorps has been 

wonderful and only increased throughout this last year. And we're so grateful. Thank you.

PRESENTER: You are welcome. All right, the next presenter is Marisol from California State University, 

San Marcos.

MARISOL CLARK-IBANEZ: Thank you. I'm here on behalf of our team from the National Latino Research 

Center and my wonderful colleague, Arcela Nuñez-Alvarez. So, I wanted to first, just like 

others, I feel like we're the OGs, old grantees—that we are grantees from 2017, and so 

we have, maybe, a slightly different focus. But I just want to do a big shout-out and thank 

you to the Office of Research Evaluation, because the 2017 grant was inspired by 

findings from a 2015 grant, and it's just really served to transform what we do and how 

we do civic engagement in the San Diego North County region.

And I just want to also say that it is so cool to know what everyone has been up to 

[LAUGHS] from the other grantee meetings. So OK, so I don't want to—I know we have 

precious time, but I just needed to just share that. Next slide?

And I just want to also let you know that we have—I have Arcela'scontact information and 

a one-minute video on our program that I'll share as we end the session. I don't want to 

distract from all the panels. But we'll share that.

OK, so what are we about? We were funded to ignite and engage a population in San 

Diego County that has been virtually ignored, and that is the elderly immigrant lowincome Latinx community members. And this is, like I said, an offshoot of a curriculum 

that was already established, actually, now 10 years ago. Arcela is the one who truly is 

the founder of what is called Universidad Popular, or the People's University, and then, it 

has had different generations. And this iteration that we're going to talk about today is 

really geared towards elders.

And we brought in social gerontologist, a Chicana colleague, who that is her specialty, 

and it really elevated our project to focus on elders. And the cornerstones of our project is 

that culturally and linguistically appropriate pedagogy. We really relied on the Paulo 

Freire popular education model, because as you're going to hear very, very briefly, most 

of our population, most of our program participants are not English-speaking as their first 

language—sometimes as their second, even. Sorry, Spanish is their second language, 

and they have very, very low formal levels of education.

However, we know that they have this wealth of what Yosef calls community cultural 

wealth. They come in with a lot of their own experiences that we seek to transform as in 

true capital. And so, our goal was to offer a program that led to a more—igniting more of 

the civic education and civic behavior and attitudes about where they belong and how 

they can connect. So next slide?
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

All right, so just to give a quick overview of the program itself, we actually—over the 

funding of the program, we've enrolled over 300 unique elders, and they came from all 

over. Even though we're in North County, San Diego, neighbors brought them. Word of 

mouth spread, and people showed up, for a Thursday morning—Thursday morning from 

kind of eight to noon class.

The classes started with breakfast and movement, because all the participants brought a 

potluck to share. And then, there was always a little mini Zumba, Zumba Gold type of a 

class. And then there was the charla, nd that's the talk, and the guest speakers and all 

that, where everyone is together and listening and participating, and being active in areas 

of civic engagement of all kinds. And I'm happy to talk to you more about some of those 

presentations and activities.

And then they split up into classes. And this, by far, was the best part of the morning, it 

seems. Because sometimes, the program participants were the students, and sometimes 

they were the leaders. But we did assess from our initial grant, what were the things that 

they were needing most help with to connect and also just feel validated for what they 

bring to the table.

And so, you can see the classes were technology for computers, also separate one for 

smartphones and tablets, crafting literacy in Spanish—as in how to write and read 

Spanish—and then multilingual literacy, which is Spanglish, English, Spanish, all blended 

into one, and then a number field trips that we managed to pull off before COVID.

And then, what are the methods we use? Well, this program had been running in different 

iterations, and different methods used, depending on the populations that we had. So, we 

had photo ethnography, pre- and post-surveys that were very, very long, and that 

required an engaged, long storytelling approach to doing surveys, qualitative interviews, 

photo elicitation interviews, and oral histories.

So, throughout the time of our program, Cultivando Sabiduria, which is "Cultivating 

Wisdom," we engaged in one or more of these methodologies, and as we reported along, 

we described each. So, I was reviewing all of the methods we used. It's like, oh, yeah, 

this is a lot. OK, next slide?

So, we wanted to just share some of the findings that we have wrapped up, on the one 

hand, and then others that we have, right now, a no-cost extension to finalize a couple 

more intensive analysis. And that is—on the survey data, we have districtive data that 

shows strong voting practices, a very strong desire to serve. So, if any AmeriCorps folks 

feel like, I can't get our Latinx, or Spanish-speaking, or immigrant communities to show 

up, I think we have something to share with you. [LAUGHS]

So, we've got something that kind of ignites that, and to connect the knowledge and with 

the larger regional problems that we want to address with community members. And we 

also saw a slight increase in the knowledge of political issues. So, this is around the preand post-test, especially the local. And I think this directly relates to, who came into our 

space? Who did our program bring in so that our participants could really understand 

what was going on?
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

And for me, the most compelling finding—I'm a sociologist; I do sociology of education— 

is we actually have quite a really compelling finding with the voices of our elders about 

their dream that was deferred, and that is to go to school. Because many had to leave 

very, very early on their education and work, essentially. And so, what did that mean, to 

be going to school and to be feeling like they're learning and they're participating in this 

formal way?

But also, we were able to capture the types of leadership and volunteer opportunities that 

our participants had by being in this space. And we really feel like that's the power of the 

social capital that was created through the curriculum. And then, finally, another 

unexpected finding or unexpected—it's so unexpected. We have a big, big written 

discussion about it that we're working on now for publication, and that is the key of 

literacy and civic engagement.

So, it's a little bit different than going to school finding. This is literally about someone 

learning to read. And the schooling was about learning and technology, and there's 

different elements to that. But there's literacy—we had two simultaneous programs going 

on, and that's Thursday morning, and this was really leading to some exciting selfdiscovery but also empowerment discoveries of, like just because I don't speak this way, 

or I don't speak all the way this way, I matter, and I have a lot to contribute.

So those literacy findings were among, I think, the most compelling. And that wraps it up 

for the start of the major findings. And I'm very happy to share more of it later when we do 

our panel discussion. Thank you.

PRESENTER: Thank you very much, Marisol. And now for Maren from the State University of New York. 

MAREN KING: Well, hello, everybody. I am so pleased to be here and want to also add my thanks to

AmeriCorps and CNCS for all of the support and funding that you have provided for our 

project and for the teenagers and other people who will come after them as a result of our 

project. So, I am an associate professor in landscape architecture at SUNY College of 

Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse. I think I'm the only landscape architect 

in our cohort here, and I'm representing our team that includes Leah Russell of the 

Syracuse Peacemaking Project, my colleague and co-PI, Dr. Christina Limpert, the team 

members of our research team, who you'll see photos of in just a minute, and our current 

student assistants.

And our project is called Raising the Next Generation of Community Leaders. It is a youth 

participatory action research project within Syracuse's Near West Side neighborhood that 

engages neighborhood teenagers as co-researchers. The Near West Side neighborhood 

has a very diverse population of Latino, Black, and white residents. It's primarily lowincome, and many people are living below the poverty line. People in the neighborhood 

have multiple health issues that the Peacemaking Center, in their earlier research, has 

found are due to a number of issues, which include lack of exercise and outdoor activities 

related in part to and concern for their personal safety and fear of crime.

One of the aspects that this project has allowed me to do and pushed me to do was 

some subsequent research, and I've come to understand that the Near West Side and
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

several other neighborhoods in the city of Syracuse—and, perhaps, in places where you 

live and work—possess the characteristics that contribute to high rates of violent crime, 

including poverty, segregation, inequality in education and employment opportunities and 

troubled relationships with the police, and I'm sorry I don't know why I'm getting so 

emotional

In response to these underlying issues that are affecting the community health, the 

Peacemaking Center had formed a community impact team to promote community 

engagement, and they developed a program called Take Back the Streets, which has 

over the last five or six years organized activities and programs that bring people together 

in different places around the neighborhood. Next slide, please.

But one of the groups that they were not able to reach were the youth and the young 

adults. And so, our project emerged from an existing goal of the community impact team 

to create a youth impact team that would provide opportunities for teenagers to engage 

and understand their neighborhood and to nurture their leadership capacity through 

natural mentoring, skill development, and civic engagement, and through a participatory 

research process, tap into that natural curiosity that is part of how we all learn.

So, the teens, as part of our team, were aged 13 to 19, and they were the core members 

of our research team from the very beginning of the project. So, they were just—they 

were not research subjects; they were actual participants. And as co-researchers, the 

team members were introduced to research as a way of understanding and addressing 

issues.

So, after our team-building an ethics training, IRB requirements, and introduction to 

various youth-oriented methods, they went through a process—we with them, of 

course—a review and discussion of issues that they had identified when they were first 

recruited as part of the project. And they developed an overarching research question of, 

How does crime and violence affect the lives of people in the neighborhood? They split 

into three teams to investigate several different questions—the effects of crime and 

violence on quality of life; the impact of social media on spreading news of that violence,; 

and the characteristics that influence the sense of safety. They use multiple methods, 

including mapping, brainstorming, interviews, and storytelling, to engage 45 other 

community members as research participants in seven different focus groups. Next slide, 

please.

So, there have been a number of findings from our process and analysis related to the 

team research questions, and this includes that the neighborhood has many strengths, 

such as organizations and services that provide support, and are places where people 

feel safe. And the team wants to highlight these and other positive attributes, because 

they want others to know about the good things that are happening in their neighborhood. 

And they found, though, that crime and violence does affect the lives of everyone in the 

neighborhood, causing fear and trauma, lack of trust, and social and physical isolation.

As in many poor urban neighborhoods, there is also what YPAR researcher Alice 

McIntyre calls environmental violence, exhibited in the form of many poor physical
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

conditions, including abandoned houses, broken up and absent sidewalks, trash, 

absentee landlords, and a lack of care in many parts of the neighborhood. And as you all 

know, the root causes of these many forms of violence have a long and deep history, and 

addressing them will take multiple actions at many levels, both top-down and bottom-up. 

Our team believes that our project will contribute to making positive change.

In addition to providing the foundation for a youth impact team, a primary action is 

communicating to the neighborhood and the city-wide audience, including city 

government, the team's findings and the value of youth and community in this type of 

participatory process. Other important findings are related to the development of skills, 

including teamwork, research methods, analysis and synthesis, and communication. 

And I did have the voice of one of our teams, but I don't think I have time for that. I've put 

it to the side. But right now, the team has been working on getting the word out about

finding partners in residents and the broader community through a narrated presentation, 

a series of engaging posters that are created, that were created with landscape 

architecture student mentors, where the team members provided the content, and 

landscape architecture students actually help them do the graphics. And they 

developed—they're developing social media platforms to disseminate their findings and 

that illustrate that social media can be used for good. They also created a gathering 

garden, a safe place for people to get together outdoors that I'll discuss in more detail 

during the questions that are related to the impact of COVID on our project. Thank you.

PRESENTER: Thank you so much. And I don't want to start the question and answer without thanking all 

of you and your teams for all the amazing work you have done. I really know how much 

effort this takes, and when we started this research grant competition, we didn't know 

where all this would go. And so, it's astonishing to us how much impact this has had. So, 

thank you so much for sharing all your work and your findings.

And so, this panel was not—all your work did not start out COVID-focused, so I wanted 

time for all of you to explain your work. But we are interested in knowing how COVID has 

impacted how you do your research and how you have adapted and pivoted because of 

COVID. So, I'm looking at the time. We have 15 minutes, and I'll just throw out both 

questions, because you may want to merge them.

The second question was, How has community engagement or collective action in your 

communities and the work you're doing been impacted by COVID? So how have you 

pivoted, and how have you seen community engagement and collective action impacted 

by COVID? So, we will just start with Dawn and move down.

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: I think I jumped ahead in my presentation earlier, so I've already said a 

little bit about this. But that really, we had a cooperative process with a larger study 

happening across a large region. And what COVID did was really break us into more of a 

collective, where individual projects happened within community. And I'm really happy 

with the results in terms of how the action of—participatory action showed up and helped 

during a really dramatic time period.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

PRESENTER: Thanks, Dawn, and we'll come back to you. [LAUGHS] Did you want-- you had another 

team member. Did you want them to say a few words?

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: Kirstin, did you want to— 

KIRSTIN: Sure, I'm here.

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: Hi, Kirstin.

KIRSTIN: Hi. I don't know if you can see me, or if I'm doing something correctly, or not. 

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: We can see you.

KIRSTIN: You can see me? OK, cool. I am Kirstin, and I am from Minnesota. And I work with the Marine 

Mills Folk School, which is located approximately 45 miles away from downtown 

Minneapolis, so pretty close to the metro area. And we got involved with the Power 

Project, and we got hit all at once with this whole project, because, first of all, we started 

in October of 2018.

We learned about the PAR Project, and we were kind of like, it's kind of slippery. We're 

not exactly sure how it goes, and how it works, and how PAR is. And most of us, 

including myself, it was our first real experience with participatory action research. And 

we had to figure out how to do it online and using Zoom and teaching everyone or 

doing—and I bet that even my study group was—one of my study groups was the board 

of directors. And I bet if you asked them today what PAR is, they would be really hard 

pressed to tell you exactly what that is.

But it came at exactly the right time. We had to improvise. We had to innovate. We had to 

work around. And what I'm really amazed at is how ingenious everyone was to be able to 

incorporate all the things that needed to happen in order to do the study. And in fact, 

yesterday, I was asked to go to a meeting, and they wanted me to come in person. I'm 

like, oh, that is so weird to be in person, because I'm so used to doing everything online 

because of the fact that we have done things during COVID.

We did a lot of classes online. We waited. We listened. We decided we did not have to 

jump in feet-first. So, we studied all of that, and we really studied how other people were 

doing things before we jumped in. We do not have to be leaders at Marine Mills Folk 

School. We decided that.

But we did have to do a lot of community outreach, and we had to develop and make 

community online. And we got pretty good at it. So, we had to be much more intentional. 

We weren't able to use all of our fancy camera equipment that we wanted to use, but we 

did get really good at Zoom. And I think we learned so much looking back. But in the 

middle of it, we didn't know exactly what we're doing or if we're doing anything right. So, 

with that, I will stop.

PRESENTER: Thank you. Thank you for that very honest comment. OK, so Rachel?

RACHEL WENRICK: OK. Yeah, I appreciate, Andrea, what you said about merging the two questions, 

because I found myself thinking, does it go here, or does it go here? But really, bottom 

line, our work is about being responsive to our community, and the pandemic, of course, 

intensified that. And it put disparities under a really glaring and ugly light. But we had 

created a space already where we could talk about those disparities together, and we
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

saw them playing out in our own group. And we could grieve and rage together and, 

eventually, express joy, and love, and gratitude for coming through it together.

We did expand our research goals to meet the needs of our community during the 

pandemic. That looked like things like volunteering to distribute food and supplies, 

providing project-sponsored gift cards for community members who participated in our 

community connection events. We developed a fundraising website for our community 

partners. But it also looked like things like porch visits and stoops sits and grocery dropoffs and continual phone calls and text messages and Zoom Hangouts when we actually 

didn't want to hang up because the FOMO was so real. And I can talk a little bit more 

when we get to the next question. Thank you.

PRESENTER: Thank you. Marisol?

MARISOL CLARK-IBANEZ: Hey, yeah, thank you. And thank you for sending these questions in advance 

to us, because even this morning, I was like, oh, there's another element. But we—as 

you've heard our program, we have a population that has already limited access to health 

care, and we had very strict shutdown, stay-at-home orders in California. So, we were a 

state that is just taking everything very seriously, which, for me, that's good, but for our 

program and our elders, not good.

And so, the impact of COVID was especially felt by them and, also, to be honest, our 

team members. Because our team members are from the community. Our team 

members have multiple responsibilities. So, we're not outside of the challenges and the 

exacerbation of not only what was going on with COVID, but of course, the Black Lives 

Matter. So much protest and violence, and you can talk about civic engagement.

So, our team and the elders were really impacted on a variety of levels. But one of the 

things that we had to flip around is doing phone. So, from March to June, we created a 

protocol to call into the participants, which, to be honest, it became—I think a couple of 

folks said it was just more about, what do you need? Or, they had a lot of questions. And 

so we had several people on the team to just keep checking in. But by June, the students 

didn't really—it's not like everything was solved. They just didn't have much more to 

check in about. We got resources, food, rent assistance—we had a lot of initiatives in our 

region. But they just wanted to know when they could come back to class. And it was like, 

we can't. We can't do it in-person.

And not to go on-—I'll have more to share, I guess, in our breakout rooms—but the Wi-Fi 

for our elders who are living in all sorts of different conditions was pretty shaky. So, the 

Wi-Fi is that digital divide. The technology equipment, what little that they did have, was 

actually being used, we found, of course, for household members who had to switch to 

virtual work or, more importantly, to virtual school. When the elders in our program were 

taking care of or were looking out for the younger kids—they're not in school anymore, 

and they're at their grandmother's house.

And so, life just became pretty impactful. But on the other hand, our own grant was 

winding down, in one sense. And so, like others said, we just shifted to the phone calls
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

and to following through on what was going on with the participants—a bit more of a 

triage.

And the final thing I'll add is that we were so grateful for so many of the collaborators who 

had a big infrastructure—whether it was the county, whether it was health services, or 

even a larger nearby senior center who could pivot, who had that infrastructure to pivot, 

and we could plug in our students into to their programs while our campus shut down all 

community work, just to be honest, from March. And they're barely, just, maybe, this last 

month, allowing for field work to resume. And even then, it's you had to go through big 

loops.

So, I wish I had more things to share about this question, but it was a severe impact. I’ll 

leave it at that. Thank you.

PRESENTER: Thank you. Maren?

MAREN KING: OK. I can speak primarily from our relationship with the teenagers, and I wish that my 

colleague Leah Russell from the Peacemaking Center could speak about what else was 

going on in the neighborhood, because it was significant. For the teens, we were 

fortunate that all of our data collection had been completed by the time COVID started, 

and so we were well into the coding and analysis of the data. But it did have a significant 

impact in terms of how they were working as a team.

And I've talked to the team members about it and gotten their thoughts on it in 

preparation for this, and they were honest in saying it was really much harder to be 

productive, and how they engaged with the project and with each other online. And they 

were so used to working in small teams and writing on flip charts and Post-It notes and 

brainstorming. And even though those things were accessible online, and we could set 

them up, it's difficult when you're working from home, and there's lots of noise and 

background noise and other activities going on.

And for me, that was something that really brought back the fact that many of these teens 

are living in homes where it's multigenerational. And you were just talking about, Marisol, 

that the elders, while they're living, potentially, with elders, and they had to be very 

careful about where they're going and what they're doing. And it did have an effect on our 

schedule and what we were able to accomplish. It's taken longer to get things done.

And for them, sitting in one place makes it really hard, because we're used to getting up 

and walking around. I mentioned when I was talking to one of the teens the other day, I 

said—and you don't get your snacks, right? We were feeding them, essentially, a late 

afternoon meal. And she said, oh, it was OK. She said, I just got up and got my own 

during our meeting.

So, they definitely have some resilience and flexibility. But honestly, they were doing all 

of their schoolwork and classes online. They are in different schools, even though they 

live in different neighborhoods. And so, they were facing many of the challenges that 

some of us were, with teaching and being online, with meetings that seemed to expand 

exponentially, right? So many more meetings. And so, it was tough for them.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

One of the ways that we adapted was last summer, actually, for about eight weeks, we 

met outside at the Peacemaking Center. And what they decided to do was an action 

project related to improving the space outside of the Peacemaking Center to create a 

safe and welcoming space. And through their work, they had started to understand, well, 

what does that mean? Why is it important that, in our neighborhood, we have a place 

where people can come gather and feel safe being there? And they could talk about 

those characteristics.

And so that project is kind of a phased project, but they were able to go and select the 

plant material. They helped with the design. They've selected wood for a bench that's 

being made by a local artisan. And so that type of action project, that physical working 

outside, was really important to the teens who were able to participate. And I can talk 

further about it and in our breakout groups.

PRESENTER: Thank you. Thank you all for your examples. And so, we are going to go into breakout 

rooms. Something to think about is, I mean, all the AmeriCorps programs have also faced 

some of the things that you are mentioning. Maybe thinking about what would be next, in 

terms of how we go from a COVID time to a non-COVID time, and what are some of the 

lessons learned? You mentioned the outdoor space, making safe spaces. This is 

something we need to think about as we move into, maybe, face-to-face, maybe keeping 

some of the online work that we've all been doing.

So, I'll leave it at that, and Lisa, can you just put everyone in some groups? And then 

we'll come back, in about 15 minutes. Thank you.

CARLOS: Basically.

PRESENTER: Hey, Carlos. OK, so again, looking at the time, we have 10 minutes. So, what I'd like to do 

is just ask our—please, write in the chat box. I mean, again, everyone was probably 

talking about different things in your rooms. But I find it interesting in terms of where 

we've been and where we're headed, in terms of not just the research, but also our 

programs. How do we take some of our lessons learned? What do we keep in terms of 

engaging people moving forward? What are the things that we're happy to leave behind 

and lessons learned in that way?

But I'd like to hear, if we could start with Dawn, and what are some of the things from a 

take-away that you heard from the chat, from the breakout rooms?

DAWN JACQUELINE MURPHY: Well, one of the things that was mentioned is that COVID really changed 

the perspective from what we thought a project would be to really meeting the needs of 

the communities and the people that we were involved with. And so—and to some extent, 

what impact we thought we might have had changed dramatically and possibly even 

deepened the community connections and the ways that civic engagement was made 

possible through the structure and the co-learning that had happened prior to the 

shutdown.

PRESENTER: Thank you. Kirstin, anything you learned?

KIRSTIN: We just talked about—one of the things for Marine Mills Folk School and also in Marisol's 

community, we deal with older individuals. Our demographic is older. And just the
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

sensitivity to how we learned very quickly how to do the outreach, how we had to listen to 

people, how much teaching we actually had to do to get people to use technology, and 

the sensitivity to knowing that those folks really want to connect with each other. It's just 

how you do that with all of the different kinds of things that they're up against with 

multigenerational home life and lack of communication devices and that sort of thing.

We at Marine Mills really did a lot of reaching out to our community and to teach how to 

use the technology. That was probably the biggest thing that we had to do in order to get 

any of our research done, was to be able to teach them how to use that. And now, going 

forward, we'll probably always have an online format in one way or the other. So that's 

kind of exciting.

PRESENTER: Thank you. Rachel?

RACHEL WENRICK: Hi. I just wanted to say real quickly, my note in the chat was because we were 

getting—we were being sent back, and I wanted to hear what Jennifer was about to say 

in Spanish to the group. And I'm wondering if we could do that now really quickly.

PRESENTER: Sure.

RACHEL WENRICK: Do you think that's possible? 

MUJER: [HABLANDO INGLÉS] You know Jennifer who? 

[RISA]

PRESENTADOR: Dos mujeres de Puerto Rico. 

MUJER: Oh.

HOMBRE: ¿Están ahí?

MUJER: [HABLANDO INGLÉS] Yes, thank you, please.

PRESENTADOR: Jennifer, si nos estás escuchando, puedes compartir tu experiencia como 

investigadora comunitaria, lo puedes decir en español.

JENNIFER: Buenas, buenas tardes. Soy Jennifer, una de las investigadoras, una de las líderes 

comunitarias del proyecto INARO. Mi experiencia como investigadora, pues, aparte de 

que estamos en el--

HOMBRE: Habla suave para que pueda traducir Andrea. 

JENNIFER: Ah [RIENDO]. OK, OK.

ANDREA: No, está bien. Hágalo y después podemos hablar, ya.

JENNIFER: OK. Este, como parte del proceso, como ha pasado con todos los proyectos, verdad, 

nosotros llevábamos en el trabajo y al entrar pues la situación con el COVID, este, eso 

nos cambia totalmente la dinámica de trabajo, de cómo llegar a la comunidad. Así que, 

tuvimos que asumir también unas responsabilidades adicionales, que era, pues, orientar 

a la comunidad con relación al COVID, las medidas de protección que debían asumir y 

cuando ya había una persona diagnosticada con COVID, pues, darle, este, [HABLANDO 

INGLÉS] support a la familia.

El trabajo que nosotros hemos hecho, pues, es un trabajo que ha sido fuerte por los 

pasados casi tres años que hemos estado trabajando en la comunidad. Pero ha sido 

gratificante. Nos ha permitido que la gente se acerque más, que sean más participativos 

en los procesos de la comunidad.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

ANDREA: OK.

Adicional, pues, expandimos lo que eran los líderes comunitarios, ¿verdad?, porque 

hemos allegado. Ahora, pues, hay variedad, desde 20 años hasta 50 que estamos 

cubriendo ahora mismo los líderes comunitarios y que son parte del proyecto. Tenemos 

un reto bien grande encima porque aunque todos somos de la comunidad donde se está 

llevando a cabo el proyecto y la gente nos conoce hemos sido nacidos y criados en la 

comunidad.

Con el proyecto hemos asumido una responsabilidad mayor porque la gente ve en 

nosotros esa figura como si fuera de, que tuviéramos poder, que pudiéramos 

transformar. ¿Y qué es lo que nosotros queremos? Transformar la mentalidad de las 

personas, de no depender de que, nosotros usamos la palabra refortalecimiento, de que 

se dé un proceso de refortalecimiento y que no tengamos que depender 100% de, del 

gobierno, de lo que es el gobierno.

Así que, sí hemos tenido nuestro impacto, verdad, dentro de todo lo arduo que ha sido el 

trabajo, hay una gran satisfacción porque la gente ha apoyado el trabajo y ha compartido 

sus experiencias y vivencias y nos ha permitido, pues, un poco llegar a gente en la 

comunidad que no habíamos podido llegar, incorporar gente al trabajo comunitario que 

jamás habían participado en los procesos en la comunidad, así que--

JENNIFER: --que ha sido bien reconfortante.

ANDREA: OK. Déjame tratar de traducir, ¿OK? Muchas gracias, Jennifer. 

JENNIFER: Gracias, Andrea.

ANDREA: OK, muchas gracias.

[HABLANDO INGLÉS] There’s a lot there, and this is why I love different languages, and it just does take 

more time but it allows for a richness, and so...

And so, Jennifer was saying that they did need to pivot quite a bit with COVID. And part 

of that is just letting people understand what it meant to be safe in COVID time. But she 

said that one of the things that this allowed, also, is to people to become closer and to 

actually have different leaders in the community that would not have been leaders come 

out of the woodwork. So different age groups from 20 to 50, and it became just much 

more community-focused in terms of trying to survive this time.

And she said one of the things that they have also learned is that the community could 

depend on each other during this time. And that is something that she's learned. And 

she's from the community, so she's been able to see how people look at her a little 

differently and looking at the leaders a little differently in terms of being able to think 

about how they can change things in their own community.

So, I know I didn't say that perfectly, but that's what Jennifer had to say. Thank you, 

Jennifer.

AUDIENCE: [INAUDIBLE] Perfect.

PRESENTER: Thank you, Thank you. So, Marisol and Maren? Marisol?

MARISOL CLARK-IBANEZ: Hi. Well, I was in with Kirstin. We were in a group together. So, she 

summarized some of the issues that we talked about.
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Civic Engagement as a Catalyst for Community Change: 2021 Research Grantee Dialogue Civic 

Engagement In The Time Of COVID 

One other thing is just about our staff, the staffing for the research project itself. And 

Connor had a good question for us. What would you keep—even though it was pretty 

intense and detrimental on many levels? And we had staff who—I think we all 

appreciated having the Zoom technology to keep going, but we also—if you remember, 

we have—there's massive unemployment.

And so not necessary for the folks who are funded by our project but their partners and 

family members, and so we had people, especially in San Diego County, who had to 

move away or who just couldn't keep their homes. And so that was another way that we 

could pivot. It's not necessarily about the delivery of the programming but, actually, one 

of the things that happened in our staff.

And there were some great ways of—I think we'll continue to meet on Zoom, because we 

can all do editing together at the same time of things. And so that was-—I know, Andrea, 

you had asked if anything had worked well during COVID. Well, on the research team, I 

would say there was some good silver linings on that—and for the whole campus, to be 

honest, but--

PRESENTER: Thank you, and Maren?

MAREN KING: Yeah, I think a lot of what we talked about has been discussed. But one of the things that 

we did talk about was similarities and differences in the age groups. Dawn was working 

more with older adults. I was working with younger teenagers. And I would say that there 

were similarities in terms of the challenges that they were facing, but also thinking about, 

as we move forward, what's their capacity?

So, the teens are terrific. They were teaching me in terms of social media and how to do 

things. Whereas I think the older adults, as was being discussed, they need, maybe, a 

little bit more skill development in being online. And so being sensitive to what the 

different needs are.

And the teens actually—in the beginning, they had really bad internet. But through their 

school, eventually, they were able to get the internet they needed to do their schoolwork. 

And so, they had that capacity starting to be built into their world that maybe a lot of 

people didn't. So that whole broadband and access to internet, if we're going to continue 

this, will continue to be an issue.

PRESENTER: Well, thank you very much, and I know we have to come to a close. But some people have 

put their links up if you want to contact them. We also have a research grantee profile 

that will be live soon, and it will have the links to our researchers, as well as to some 

videos and websites and other material that they've created. Anyway, thank you all for 

joining, and I hope for those of you who are staying on for the second one, you don't 

have to get off. You just stay on, and we'll see you in about eight minutes. Thank you so 

much. Bye.

MARISOL CLARK-IBANEZ: Thank you.