Our Approach
OUR THEORY OF CHANGE
Expertise is founded in community…
Whether on the local, national, or international level, we answer community-led calls for collaborative support to improve public and global health services, expand access, and address inequitable public policies.
HOW WE SUPPORT CHANGE
Engaging Communities to Build Resilient Networks
In the face of increasing public health challenges, social insecurity, and natural hazards, RISC strengthens and promotes community resilience by engaging communities and fostering grassroots solutions to complex structural problems. We forge collaborative partnerships with community organizations, Tribal Nations and Indigenous-serving organizations, and local grassroots networks and communities. Through these partnerships, we work to bridge resource gaps and advance sustainable, locally-driven strategies that address the unique challenges communities face to eradicate large scale structural problems, ensuring long-term impact and respect for local knowledge. We center problem-specific and place-based models of impact that reflect our partners’ visions for their communities.
Promoting Inclusive Research
At RISC, we do ‘research for the people, by the people,’ which means shifting the research lens: we move beyond the notion that knowledge is best produced by academic ‘experts’ and researchers from outside the community where research takes place. Instead, RISC recognizes the diverse communities researchers come from, are embedded in, and are accountable to. And we elicit the unique skills and perspectives of community practitioners as leaders in the knowledge production process. We align responsible, high-quality academic research with place-based knowledge partnerships and the lived expertise of community stakeholders through dialogue-driven team science methods and community clinics that ensure all participants are involved in guiding action.
We ensure our community partners are engaged at every stage of knowledge production and leave with tangible outputs that serve their expressed needs. To achieve this, we ground our evidence-driven research in place-based and human-centric frameworks such as healing justice and engaged humanities. We champion reciprocal research methods that are robustly consensual and dialogic, and research outputs are tailored to serve stated community interests.
Driving Innovation through Sustainable Solutions
RISC believes that meaningful community engagement results in increasing the flow of resources to the communities that need them most. We are committed to easing our partners’ existing cost burden, ensuring the partnership does not strain existing community resources. A signature approach to achieve this is our no-cost services available to under-resourced community partners. To underwrite these activities, we drive innovation in an array of important areas that advance our excellence in securing lasting change:
Strategic Academic Partnerships
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RISC builds unique and transformative partnerships with institutions of higher education to connect their rich and varied resources with our community partners.
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We harness the collective power of academic centers, law schools and legal service clinics, medical schools and academic health care systems, humanities institutes, and scholars working across business and engineering schools to produce high-impact public-serving scholarship guided by community engagement.
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Our relationships with academic institutions allow RISC to assemble elite, multi-institutional, and cross-functional teams with expansive capacities for targeted problem-solving. This team science approach is uniquely suited to collaboration with community stakeholders in clinic-style research and engagement.
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We incentivize academic-community collaborations by advancing innovative models of faculty service and research impact that reflect the value of strategic research-practice partnerships.
Mission-Driven Talent Development
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RISC believes in building the next generation of community-based scholar advocates and practitioners.
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Across undergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, faculty, and community practitioner spheres, we facilitate strategic professional development opportunities through fellowships, education, workshops, labs, and experiential learning opportunities. We build powerful teams trained to conduct ethical research, advance community advocacy, and develop essential competencies in place-based research ethics and culturally specific community engagement.
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We cultivate collaborative, supportive, and strengths-based learning environments across diverse fields. To sustain our efforts in serving communities, we are dedicated to accelerating talent development to serve community needs.
Locally-Driven Answers
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RISC answers each expressed community need with solutions that are customized and locally-based.
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Across our four advocacy areas, the numerous calls we receive do not have simple or identical solutions. We employ diverse tools, such as grant-writing, project alignment, philanthropy, program evaluation, advocacy services and network development to collaboratively develop targeted solutions. We prioritize delivering long term, sustainable, structural solutions a community needs over short term, stop gap measures.
Our Approach in Action: Calls We Have Answered
- Securing large-scale, direct-to-surivor funds that provide safe, accessible housing for survivors of domestic and sexual violence
- Investigating gaps in civil rights legislation to support the legal representation of civil rights claimants in the US
- Conducting field-defining program impact evaluations for community youth leadership programs
- Creating an ethical dataset for missing and unidentified women of color unreported in national datasets
- Developing administrative, fiscal, and organizational capacity for grassroots and micrograssroots organizations serving underserved communities
- Organizing a community-led music therapy program
- Supporting an Indigenous feminist coalition delivering public health services to Indigenous youth
- Organized funding to support a summer camp featuring gender-based violence prevention programming for Detroit wards of the state