About Us

Monday, October 1, 2018

Finalizing our Community Framework

We continue to analyze our data and dig more and more deeply into our results.  As we have done so, we have discovered that our Community Framework continues to evolve and grow as we further understand our findings.

In the latest iteration of our Community Framework we find the same themes: Power and Privilege, Trust and Transparency, Realities and Relevance, and Commitment and Collaboration. But, we've found that Power and Privilege and Realties and Relevance represent challenges while Trust and Transparency and Commitment and Collaboration represent tools.


We've found that to represent the interplay among all the themes and the relationship between the tools and challenges, we needed to: 

1) Ensure that all the themes were clearly connecting with all the other themes -- thus all the colors  in the framework touch. 

2) Power and Privilege, represented in the blue is the category that most influences collaborations and all the other categories. It is the foundation of equitable collaborations and thus, appears on the outer edge as the base of the framework (looking at it from above). Realities and Relevance, represented in yellow indicate that even when following best practices and exhibiting the best of intentions, these break down when implementing programming and these challenges may prevent successful collaborations.

3) Trust and Transparency and Commitment and Collaboration depicted as two figures, one brown and and one cream, are connecting with each other, perhaps hugging, perhaps dancing. These are tools utilized to overcome the challenges. 

It is important to see the tools in the context of the power dynamics and the realities of the collaboration!

We can't promise that our Community Framework won't continue to evolve, because it is a living, breathing framework that changes with our communities and adapts to our collective understanding of our work.