From data to action: Youth and adult co-researchers take their findings on the road

From 2009-2011, youth and staff leaders from the East Oakland Youth Development Center (EOYDC) participated in a community-engaged qualitative research study based in and about their inner-city neighborhood. Many of the youth were eager to find out what happened once their words went from the tape recorder to the page. As a result, these youth collaborated with the “academic” adult researcher to form a research collective called “My Identity is Community” or “MiC,” in which they created poetic texts from their interview data in order to make sense of their everyday lives and their home, school, and neighborhood environments. In May 2011, these poetic texts were co-published by the youth in the form of a poetry anthology entitled “Y U Gotta Call It Ghetto?” Since then, the youth leaders-turned-researchers-turned-published authors have literally taken their data on the road, presenting at academic conferences, City Hall, the State Capitol, community events, town hall meetings, public libraries, and bookstores, and doing television interviews. Poetry, and other expressive mechanisms, has been shown to draw out powerful emotions from historically under-represented groups that other methodologies might not be able to capture. As co-researchers in the study, EOYDC's youth leaders are acknowledged as “experts” on issues pertaining to their own neighborhood. This presentation gives the youth-adult research team another MiC with which to share their findings.