Leveraging Community Assets in a Networked Improvement Community to Support Housing Insecure and Foster Youth

• In Event: Youth Stories as Counternarrative in Educational Research

Abstract

Leveraging communities' assets is an important part of reimagining how we prioritize equity and sustainability in community-engaged research. We analyze a Networked Improvement Community (NIC) to explore and address a shared problem of practice when supporting housing insecure and foster youth within a Southern California community. Through stakeholder interviews, we found that partners leverage their community cultural wealth in varying capacities to support the mental, emotional, physical, and financial well-being of students. Preliminary data analysis revealed how differences in organizational constraints and roles created variety in the assets that partners bring to a NIC and how they are leveraged. This study sheds light on how practitioners can bring their assets to design imagined solutions in research-practice partnerships (RPPs).

Authors

• Verenisse Ponce Soria, University of California - Irvine

• Lora Cawelti, University of California - Irvine

• Erica Jeanne Van Steenis, University of California - Irvine

• June Ahn, University of California, Irvine