Exploring New Ways to Support Marginalized Youth

What is community engaged research?

CESI staff are often asked this question when describing their work in collaboration with communities. While there are many approaches to 'community engagement', we find that this type of scholarship flourishes in the context of deep, reciprocal relationships with community partners, organizations, and groups.

These collaborative projects create impacts that are "just not going to stay contained in a journal" says Chief Executive Officer of Community Living Stratford and Area Trevor McGregor. To Trevor, these relationships and these partnerships "[have] given a voice to a number of people that [a] literature review never ever, ever produced." Community Living agencies - non-profit organizations which support adults with developmental disabilities - value the centering and honouring of the diverse voices of the constituents they serve.

In 2012, Community Living organizations across Southwestern Ontario began working with the University of Waterloo – Stratford to explore and better understand the experiences of young adults transitioning from child welfare to adult developmental services, otherwise known as Transition Aged Youth (TAY).

The Community Engaged Scholarship Institute joined as a partner a few years later, supporting in the final production of outputs in 2018, and taking on the second phase of the project in late 2020 through the Research Shop. The project's second phase was focused on understanding the context that TAY were currently living in post-transition to adult services and how existing services were attending to the needs of these young adults.

From the start, CESI and Community Living Stratford – as well as other key stakeholders across the region – worked hand in hand around the imagining, development, and implementation of the TAY project. Community partners were instrumental in the design process and helped create semi-structured interviews and led study recruitment. Throughout it all, meeting the community-identified research goal and the wellbeing and needs of TAY were at the forefront of the partnership's mind.

Like all good relationships, the partnership between Community Living and CESI took work, care, and adaptability. For example, while the initial purpose of the second phase was to centre the voices of TAY, staff recruiters within participating Community Living organizations were struggling to recruit participants. Despite numerous brainstorming sessions with key stakeholders, TAY recruitment remained low. As Trevor highlighted, "needing data and gathering data are two different things on their own."

Both Community Living Stratford and CESI wanted to ensure that they were doing right by the TAY who came through Community Living's doors. After careful consideration, they decided to shift focus to service providers. The reason for this move was two-fold: (1) the partnership wanted to understand systemic barriers that TAY might face; and (2) the partnership wanted to try to understand why recruitment was proving to be so difficult.

According to Research Shop project manager Julia Linares-Roake, interviews with service providers revealed that, "these young adults have a distrust of the system" and that the transition process could be a traumatic period of their lives. "And so when we were asking them to be interviewed," Julia continued, "we were asking them to relive these traumatic experiences," which was a big ask for any participant involved in the research process.

By working closely together, CESI and Community Living were able to identify these recruitment issues early in the research process. In order to acknowledge that TAY may not have wanted to talk about their experiences with outside researchers, the project partners worked together and decided to switch focus, from centering the voices of those who may not want to be centered by research, to exploring systemic norms which were affecting TAY during and after their transition.

As the partners wrap up the second phase of the TAY project, there are talks of what is to be done next. Both Trevor and Julia are excited about future collaboration opportunities, and plan to continue conversations around how they can re-imagine policies and practices which are inclusive and welcoming to youth transitioning from childhood to adulthood when they walk through the doors of adult service agencies. Additionally, both CESI and Community Living Stratford are eager to explore ways in which to give TAY the tools to centre their own voices, in arenas that feel right to them.