Residents in one neighborhood are claiming their collective power to transform their community as they root out structural racism and advance health equity.
Auburn Gresham in Chicago’s South Side is home to residents filled with hopes and dreams for their families and their community. They are fiercely determined to make it a place where economic opportunity is abundant, everyone can thrive, and health isn’t a privilege for some but a right for all.
With this resolve, over a decade ago, residents invited our organization, BECOME, a Center for Community Engagement and Social Change working for a socially just world, to partner with them. They shared their deepest desire to see all their neighbors flourish. The elders had memories of a vibrant community in the 1950s and 1960s, where a canopy of trees shaded the streets, many Black families owned their homes, and a robust social fabric knitted residents together. It felt like the kind of safe haven everyone deserves.
But decades of racism and decisions made without community input eroded this sense of belonging. The systems in Auburn Gresham, as in so many communities, undermined the wellbeing of Black people, leading to poverty, chronic disease, and violence.
Yet the neighborhood retained a critical asset—people determined to bring unity, caring, and peace to the place they call home.
A community-driven path to health equity
BECOME recognizes that residents understand best what their communities need. With local leadership and the right tools, they can help everyone live their healthiest life possible.
BECOME started by listening to Auburn Gresham residents through interviews, focus groups and convenings. Together, we identified four priorities for a thriving community: Supporting youth, increasing community safety, boosting economic growth, and building systems of care that allow residents to address local needs. To act on these priorities, we partnered to create our first “innovation group,” focused on youth, and are building similar spaces around the other areas. These groups will allow neighbors to meet, brainstorm solutions, heal together, and support everyone’s right to thrive.
The youth innovation group has already developed a vision statement calling for “a world where every young person in Auburn Gresham is free to be their truest self, grounded in purpose, courage, joy, and culture.” Now, they are considering what kind of systems and structures they can create to support the relationship building they see as key to realizing that vision.
A new way to measure success
Before creating the youth innovation group, we developed an evaluation strategy that challenges traditional methods. Instead of treating evaluation as a separate process, we made it central to the work, using it as a tool for critical reflection, community learning, and solidarity building.
Evaluators often include community input but remain outsiders with academic, government or nonprofit backgrounds. We wanted to try something bolder: Honor the experiences of community residents by stepping aside so they could fully own the evaluation process.
Drs. Gabriela Garcia (left) and Dominica McBride (middle), BECOME co-creators, and Revolution MacInnes (right), BECOME board member, share a conversation at BECOME's Love and Liberation Festival. Photo by Eli Williamson and provided courtesy of BECOME.
This led us to create the Community Evaluation and Innovation Lab (CEIL). CEIL equips “community evaluators”—supporting those who are most affected by an intervention, initiative, or decision to determine what questions to ask about it, gather the data to answer those questions, and decide how best to use those data. CEIL’s process is dynamic, driven by local leadership and always honoring lived experience.
To lead the charge and identify solutions that advance equity, these community evaluators need training and skills. And so do we. There is often tension between those of us who see ourselves as “professionals,” eager to share our expertise, and those who have been systematically excluded from quality education or professional opportunities. Easing that tension and building trust requires being open to learning and truly listening. Imposing a uniform evaluation curriculum on a community guarantees failure because there is no single formula for what we are trying to do.
To uncover a community’s truths, we have to dedicate ourselves to building trusting relationships and honoring diverse voices. In its first year, CEIL formed an eight-person community evaluation team in Auburn Gresham. Together, we mapped local assets, analyzed local culture and history, and identified the power centers that make things happen.
Residents helped us understand the need to respect process as much as outcomes. Typically, an evaluation focuses on gathering quantitative data and measuring results: Is violence decreasing? Are reading scores going up? In Auburn Gresham, residents wanted qualitative data, too, collected through questions that would bring daily experiences to light: How do you react to trauma? How are you treated at school? What do you need to live your best life? If people were going to openly share their difficulties, they needed evaluators to understand those conversations could be painful and to make residents feel safe.
Developing an evaluation to effectively capture all of this took longer than expected. But we knew that if we didn’t ask the questions community members wanted to have answered, we would undermine authentic collaboration and fail to learn what the community needed to know.
Building power
After collecting data, the Auburn Gresham evaluators engaged in a “sense-making” process, helping to interpret what we had learned and to plan next steps. The youth innovation group, for example, identified the need for more mental health resources and organized a youth-focused festival that included assessments, real-time therapy, mindfulness practices, dancing, and healthy cooking demonstrations. With training and practice, the CEIL team will assume greater leadership responsibility and eventually serve as independent evaluators. Over time, BECOME expects to step further back while remaining available to offer counsel as needed.
One of the unexpected outcomes of CEIL’s work has been its impact on those involved. In our early planning, we thought mostly about how best to share the technical skills required to conduct an evaluation. But as our relationship with community partners deepened, the humanity of our work has come into sharper focus. Community evaluators are becoming more aware of the structural racism that undermines health and wellbeing and learning to use their voices more effectively. At the same time, they are finding joy and support in one another as they share experiences. All of that, in turn, has made them more hopeful about their futures and that of their community.
Communities are best equipped to build long-term, sustainable solutions for overcoming structural barriers to health and advancing health equity. Learn about how we are investing in community power.
About the Authors
Dominica McBride founded BECOME in 2013. She is a leading thinker on how we evolve beyond the current racial-equity paradigm, a champion of culturally responsive evaluation, and a grassroots advocacy strategist. She is the author of Becoming Changemakers: The Exquisite Path to Leadership and Liberation for Women of Color.
Scott Christian is senior evaluator at BECOME and an outspoken advocate for equity and social justice.