How Would You Do It? Using Community Cafes to Co-Design Community

Abstract

Background and Purpose: In the past years, there has been increasing recognition of the adverse impact of the child welfare system on families and the need to focus on prevention to prevent children and families from experiencing adverse outcomes and unnecessary system involvement. Community Based Participatory Action Research (CBPR) is a research approach that actively involves participants in understanding and addressing social issues. With a focus on social justice, CBPR promotes power sharing and meaningful engagement with those affected by the research. Chapin Hall is committed to working with communities most impacted by social problems to identify solutions that best meet their needs. To realize this commitment, Chapin Hall has been using Community Cafes, a CBPR approach, that uses informal, solution focused community conversations, to directly hear from families and child maltreatment mandated reporters about the strengths in their communities and the solutions they would like to exist to address family needs through alternative approaches to child welfare systems.

Methods: We conducted 6 community cafes in two states in mainly rural communities (1 urban). The community cafes were designed and hosted in partnership with lived experts, child welfare staff, and community service providers. Families and mandated reporters were asked to indicate how they would design a community-based program to most effectively engagement them and serve them. After initial analysis of community café notes, 9-member check-in sessions were hosted with participants to ensure interpretations and analysis of the discussion reflected their conversations.

Results: The community cafes provided several insights regarding how families would like to be served by providers to have meet their needs. Generally, there was strong alignment between families and mandated reporters’ program design. Both groups emphasized the need for a voluntary community-based program in which the main point of contact was a peer or lived expert with relevant experience to families. Participants also described that this individual needed to be consistent and have the authority, resources, and knowledge to help families meet their needs in a timely manner. Both groups emphasized the importance of using a variety of outreach and engagement strategies to address different barriers and preferences for engagement. Participants also provided several ideas to address service access barriers such as providing culturally and language relevant services, family centered services, and services with flexible hours, among other things. Participants agreed that, particularly in rural communities, that services and supports needed to be provided with dignity and service access should be normalized to address bias and stigma concerns.

Conclusions and Implications: This study was among the first to engage families and mandated reporters in ideating through the design of a Community Response Program to inform the implementation of a future CR program. The findings provide valuable insights for existing and burgeoning CR programs and more generally, prevention programs whose goal is to support families in their communities.