1 Nov, 2017

Ask Nicole: How Can I Be More Culturally Responsive?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T20:06:50-04:00November 1st, 2017|Categories: Consulting|Tags: Ask Nicole, consulting, Equity|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know.

Two months ago, I facilitated an evaluation meeting for one of my clients. The client, an organization that specializes in community-based health peer-to-peer training related to pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and early parenting, received funding for a multi-year birth equity project that also includes program evaluation capacity building.

During the meeting, the staff and I had a conversation about the various aspects of program evaluation, from planning and implementation, to data interpretation and measuring impact.

A takeaway message I gave to the staff is that, try as we might, it can be difficult to design and implement and evaluation process that is unbiased. Why? Situational Awareness.

In the general sense, situational awareness is being aware of your surroundings. This keep you on your toes and more likely to sense danger. In the context of program evaluation, situational awareness can help you spot red flags as well as help you become aware of not only your surroundings, but also what your presence is adding to that environment.

So, I asked the staff:

“How can you and your organization become more culturally responsive?”

Many under sourced communities are already leery of researchers, evaluators and anyone coming to their community to collect data. As a Black person and as a woman, you’d think it would be easy for me to go into a community where I share the same race and/or gender. But sometimes, that can be where the commonality ends.

There’s a power dynamic at play, intimidation, a history of mistrust of researchers and evaluators, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities being viewed as subjects or statistics rather people with important and valuable stories to tell. And I’m at a point in my personal and professional life where I can acknowledge the various levels of privilege and power I have.

It’s very easy to become comfortable with our commonalities, because those commonalities can be the “in” we need into a community setting. But you still have to do the work before, during, and after to ensure you’re being as intentionally responsive to a community’s culture as possible. And “culture” is more than just race/ethnicity. It encompasses age, gender identity, religion, language, ability, sexual preference, geographic region, physical and mental health, how an organization operates, and more.

More importantly, you have to be aware of your biases and motivations, as well as know who has the power, money, and political ties to make decisions within the organization you’re working with and within the communities they serve. You also have to know the systems people are operating under that can impact cultural responsiveness. Just as I reflect after a project has ended, I also pinpoint the context that a project is operating within before I start a project and during the project. Here’s a 3-part reflective process I use to reflect on my level of cultural responsiveness. These questions are adaptable to any situation where you’re interacting with a client and a community or cultural group:

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19 Oct, 2017

Should I Pass You the Mic, Or Speak For You?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:58:15-04:00October 19th, 2017|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: activism, community organizing|0 Comments

With the rise of storytelling as a form of advocacy and resistance, and various forms of research and evaluation that place communities, researchers, and evaluators on the same playing field gaining in popularity, I’ve been refining my thinking and processes in develop more effective strategies for centering the voices and lived experiences of women and girls of color.

When I’m working with my clients, I always have in the back of my mind who I’m really working for. And it’s not my clients. My clients are essentially the gatekeepers. They provide the programs, services, and initiatives that are designed to reach women and girls of color. Depending on what I’m doing with clients, I’m tasked with finding ways to engage women and girls of color to share their experiences in order to measure the program, service, or initiative’s impact. But before I’m an evaluator or program designer, I’m an activist and community organizer.

The Center for Evaluation Innovation’s 2010 brief, “Grassroots Action and Learning for Social Change: Evaluating Community Organizing”, posits that evaluating advocacy initiatives and community organizing campaigns should be participatory, more prospective rather than less retrospective, learning-based, culturally responsive, and less academic. The brief also shares a framework for evaluating community organizing campaigns, which includes:

Craft evaluation questions that are relevant and useful to organizers to generate buy-in and participation
Set clear yet flexible interim benchmarks that focus on outcomes related to various organizing components (such as participation and membership, organizing wins, and organizational capacity)
Utilize data collection methods that fit the style of the organization and tailored to capture various components of organizing
Develop buy-in and trust for successful implementation
Set achievable expectations to maximize learning and sustainability
Use evaluation results to create impact
Clarify what “success” means

Innovative and engaging frameworks and methods like these is what making program design and evaluation fun for me. And you’d think that processes like these are a no-brainer, but they aren’t for many organizations and communities.

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13 Oct, 2017

Try This: The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:57:47-04:00October 13th, 2017|Categories: Speaking & Facilitation|Tags: reproductive justice, Try This|0 Comments

“The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now” is a reflective call to action process that frames our experiences, highlights the commonalities of our lived experiences, and connects our stories to the current social climate to promote action. I first learned of this process from Jamia Wilson. Jamia shared it with me as I was preparing to speech related to young women of color several years ago.

Here’s what you need:

Sheets of paper
Something to write with

The steps:

This process connects your personal story to current problems our communities are facing, and to the larger vision of a world we want.

Using the topic of Reproductive Justice:

The Story of Me: Share your story of how Reproductive Justice connects with your identities. Use a personal story that brought your attention to various reproductive oppressions and injustices.
The Story of Us: Share the current state of how reproductive injustices are impacting your communities. Use prompts such as “We live in a world where…” or “When I look around my community, I see…”. This can be related to policies that do more harm than good, lack of sex education in your school, or historical or current events such as the shackling of pregnant prisoners during labor and delivery or involuntary sterilization of women of color
The Story of Now: Share your vision for reproductive freedom. Use prompts such as “We will have reproductive justice when…” What would be the end game to have Reproductive Justice? What would that look like in your community?

You can do this process alone or in a group. If in a group, have participants identify the commonalities in their stories and develop a strong call to action (CTA). Try this exercise and let me know how it goes.

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RAISE YOUR VOICE: Share one way you can use The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now process below in the comments section.

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16 Aug, 2017

Self Care Corner: Face Your Worst Case Scenario

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:55:12-04:00August 16th, 2017|Categories: Self & Community Care|Tags: Self Care Corner|0 Comments

If you’re someone who, in the words of Gabrielle Bernstein, has a tendency to future trip, this Self Care Corner exercise is for you.

We all have things that we worry about, and oftentimes thinking about what could possibly happen causes more anxiety than the thing we’re worried about.

Over the weekend, I read a blog post by writer and law of attraction coach Kelli Cooper of Life Made to Order. Kelli writes:

One of the best ways to clean up your energy is a willingness to receive all outcomes. A willingness to accept the things you fear worst may happen. A willingness to believe that maybe those things have to happen in order for you to make the shifts required of you. A willingness to believe that even if these things happen, it’s still all good and you’ll be okay.

I started thinking about an issue that’s been causing me a great deal of stress over the past few months. After giving myself time to wallow in self pity and thinking about the worst thing that can happen, I took out a small notebook and began to write.

When an issue is stuck in your head and has no way of releasing itself, it can seem overwhelming.

But when you stop running from your issue, turn around and observe it with non judgment, what once seemed insurmountable begins to look like something you can deal with.

This is a process you can do alone, or (if you’re a social worker or someone in the helping professions) walk your clients through it.

Here are 9 questions to ask yourself:

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9 Aug, 2017

Try This: Storytelling for Reproductive Justice

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2021-08-19T19:45:38-04:00August 9th, 2017|Categories: Equity & Justice|Tags: reproductive justice, Try This|0 Comments

(Image: Renee Bracey Sherman. Source)

“Reproductive Justice can be used as a theory for thinking about how to connect the dots in our lives. It is also a strategy for bringing together social justice movements. But also, it is a practice-a way of analyzing our lives through the art of telling our stories to realize our visions and bring fresh passions to our work.” ~ Loretta Ross, “What Is Reproductive Justice?” (Reproductive Justice Briefing Book: A primer on Reproductive Justice and Social Change)

Why is storytelling so powerful? Because it works. Before video, social media, and other media we use today, many of us remember listening to stories as children from our parents and grandparents. Stories resonate with us and helps us build powerful connections with others. Sharing our story also helps others to build compassion, especially when they haven’t had the same experience.

Storytelling isn’t something new when it comes to advancing Reproductive Justice. Testifying before political leaders, using social media, blogging, podcasting, or video, attending speak-outs, or simply sharing between close friends and loved ones are some examples of how storytelling can be used as an empowerment tool. And today’s exercise will hopefully do just that.

This exercise can be found in the We Are Brave Toolkit: Building Reproductive Autonomy and Voices for Equity, created by Western States Center (with a few adaptations from me). The exercise was co-authored by Karla Castaneda, Diego Hernandez, Oscar Tzintzun, and Rebecca Shine of Momentum Alliance in Portland, Oregon.

Here’s what you need:

Sheets of paper to write on (or notepads)
Writing utensils for each participant
Flip chart paper and markers
Chairs arranged in a circle (or have the participants seated on the floor in a circle if they are able to)

The steps:

There are several parts to this exercise, but I’m focusing on the writing portion. The writing prompt given is

“I am from a body that…”

Using the prompt, spend 15 minutes or so sharing how Reproductive Justice connects with your identities. Being a young person, person of color, woman, trans person, person living with a mental health diagnosis, coming from a poor background, living in a “red” or flyover state, are just some identities we can write about.

Here’s a slight adaptation: In 2011, I spoke on a Congressional Black Caucus panel on on young women of color and reproductive health activism. I wasn’t sure how to craft speech. Jamia Wilson shared this process of connecting my personal story to current problems our communities are facing, and to the larger vision of a world we want:

The Story of Me: Share your story of how Reproductive Justice connects with your identities (This is essentially the “I am from a body that…” prompt)
The Story of Us: Share the current state of how reproductive injustices are impacting your communities using the prompts “We live in a world where…” or the prompt “When I look around my community, I see…”
The Story of Now: Share your vision for reproductive freedom using the prompt “We will have reproductive justice when…”

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Ask Nicole: How Can I Be More Culturally Responsive?

“How can you and your organization become more culturally responsive?”

Should I Pass You the Mic, Or Speak For You?

Try This: The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now

Here’s what you need:

The steps:

RAISE YOUR VOICE: Share one way you can use The Story of Me, The Story of Us, The Story of Now process below in the comments section.

Like this post? Subscribe to the Raise Your Voice newsletter to receive resources, advice, and tips to help you raise your voice for women and girls of color.

Self Care Corner: Face Your Worst Case Scenario

Try This: Storytelling for Reproductive Justice

Here’s what you need:

The steps:

“I am from a body that…”

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