We use participatory methods such as storytelling, cultural asset mapping, and arts-based inquiry to engage partners in a shared process of knowledge-building, one that enhances trust and sustainability while addressing existing disparities. Our hands-on approach increases communication and the exchange of stories while ensuring that many voices are valued in research, evaluation, and engagement processes.

Ethnography is place-based and immersive—a research method that centers ongoing listening, embodied exchange, and being there.  Ethnographic insight accumulates through collaboration and over time, often via years of trust-building and reciprocity.  Ethnographic values can be embedded in other qualitative methodologies such as in-depth interviews and participant-observation. No matter the time we have, we still take the long view.

We lend an ethnographic lens to place-based inquiries. Doing so, we agitate against “top-down” practices and instead cultivate a learning environment in which community members, residents, and other participants are equally valued for their experience and expertise. Valuing collaboration means working to reduce structural barriers to participation. We learn with people and places, not about them.

To achieve social equity, we work to correct policies that disenfranchise and discriminate against groups and individuals. We must acknowledge histories and redress past wrongs to change current inequalities. In Philadelphia, this includes recognizing the interconnected violent legacies of enslavement, settler colonialism, and state-orchestrated forced expulsion of Lenni-Lenape Indigenous communities from Lënapehòkink. It also includes supporting ongoing actions for reparation and sovereignty for contemporary descendent and diasporic communities.

Our projects share a concern with achieving health equity and celebrating community wellness. Our definition of health is a broad one and our project portfolio is likewise robust. We work across goals, from environmental stewardship and economic justice to food sovereignty and harm reduction. Community wellness also includes documenting and celebrating life ways — healing and survival and how we make exuberant meaning from everyday life.

We collaborate across sectors and disciplines and use a rich range of research and methods to inform our work. In our collective efforts to improve wellbeing, we exchange knowledge with a range of practitioners from community health workers to policy-makers, artists, Indigenous healers, social movement leaders, clinicians, librarians, historians, academic researchers, community organizers, case workers, and gardeners. The more diverse we are, the stronger we are.

Our work comes from engagement with the possible. To activate possibility is to set aside what we think we know - our habits of mind. We connect with other practitioners who want to challenge disciplinary boundaries and experiment with methods. Curiosity leads to innovation. We center the unexpected in an ongoing effort to decolonize knowledge—how we learn, what we value, and who is considered an “expert.”

We believe that the arts and humanities enhance our lives; they are not superfluous, nor do they exist solely as potential vehicles for nationalist rhetoric. We believe that social science research and programs that center diversity, equity, inclusion, and access are necessary to correct disparities, including health disparities. We uphold feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial thinkers alongside the work of community organizers, labor activists and researchers who work for collective rights.  Despite efforts to devalue liberatory work, it will be not erased.