At this local research conference, community partnership is key

As Daniel O’Brien, director of the Boston Area Research Initiative, welcomed guests and speakers to the group’s 2025 conference, the initiative’s acronym “BARI” was emblazoned behind him.

On that screen, the little “i” was dancing.

In his remarks, O’Brien encouraged attendees to be like that wiggling, squirming “i” and to find joy in the day.

It was an appeal that marked a strange moment for a regularly out-of-the-ordinary conference.

BARI, which is housed at Northeastern University, focuses on “civic research,” an approach to data collection and study that centers on partnership with the communities involved and emphasizes the creation of products that have an impact on those same communities.

At BARI, much of that work tackles issues related to topics around equity — things like poor air quality which often impacts disadvantaged neighborhoods at a heightened rate, social and economic mobility, housing access and preservation and environmental justice — many things that O’Brien said have been in the crosshairs of the administration of President Donald Trump.

The Trump administration, in recent weeks, has started to look toward higher education institutions to pressure them away from perspectives and teachings that don’t align with its priorities.

So, as he opened the annual “Insight-to-Impact Summit,” held at Roxbury Community College April 11, O’Brien had another request for attendees:

“I think we can use today to advance the work not just in spite of the context but because of the context,” he said.

At the heart of the event, which was hosted in collaboration with RCC’s Center for Economic and Social Justice, was the idea of increasing collaboration and bringing in more voices to academic work.

That perspective, organizers said, can better support the communities that researchers work with or, in less civic-focused research, draw from.

“You have to understand the people behind the numbers and then you have to empower them to make decisions,” said Anna Johannes, a retired Paralympian and inclusive marketing and design consultant, at the keynote panel during which she spoke.

Breaking out of that ivory tower is at the heart of the vision of the civic research BARI focuses on, said Kim Lucas, associate director of civic research at the initiative and professor of public policy and economic justice at Northeastern University.

“Projects don’t get done with just one group of people doing them; change doesn’t get made with just one group working on it,” she said. “It takes all types of coalition. It also takes all types of expertise to be able to get something off the ground and done.”

The tools and approaches from academic research and data collection can be useful additions to getting those projects off the ground, Lucas said.

Using the “really powerful tool” of research to target a particular issue or understand a particular concept can more effectively put it to use, O’Brien said.

“It can surface all sorts of facts and relationships that you might not see and understand otherwise,” he said. “But in the purpose of what? Research is never fully inert.”

It can also lead to better information about how topics actually play out.

While presenting previous research on the intersection of backyard chickens and the avian flu, Boston University researcher Jessica Leibler gave the example that different communities keep chickens for different reasons. What might be a pet and a source of eggs in one household might be a source of meat and a reflection of cultural practices in a different one.

However, recognizing that they have different motivations can support a conversation about minimizing risk rather than shutting chicken ownership down entirely. Greater partnership between residents and researchers can break patterns of academics engaging with communities in what Leibler called a “one-way stream of negativity” and can help research like hers better serve communities who rely on chickens to provide a good food source through eggs or as a traditional carry-over from their home country.

“Part of the challenge is realizing there’s no one-size-fits-all as it comes to messaging,” she said.

That message was well received by community organizations present at the conference.

In response to comments from Leibler and others who spoke during the session, Rene Mardones, director of community organizing at the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative, described how the day before he had spoken with a different group of researchers about housing issues. When he asked them if they were doing any work with legislation around the topic, they said it wasn’t their job.

The engagement from researchers at the BARI conference, he said, excited him.

And the broader question of bringing in laypeople impacted by research is something often on his mind.

When he attends conversations like the one at the BARI conference, he is often left with the question of, “Ok, how are we going to involve our communities?” said Mardones, who served during the session as a “provocateur,” a role designed by conference organizers to challenge speakers to generate more conversation on the topic.

And, Northeastern Professor Ted Landsmark said recent changes in the political landscape make the work all the more important.

“What we did before — and by ‘before,’ I mean as little as two weeks ago — is no more,” he said during the keynote panel, on which he sat.

What’s left, he suggested, is a moment for a shift toward more humility, more self-care, and more relationship-building among institutions.

“This is the moment for us to be strong, in terms of the values that we bring forward, in terms of the ethics that we speak from,” Landsmark said.

At the conference, the latitude of that work on display was broad, ranging from big and aspirational to the nitty gritty of everyday life.

In one session, speakers tackled breakthrough solutions to climate change and its impacts, like the state’s 2022 textile disposal ban, which prohibited throwing clothes and other old textiles in the landfill. Another looked at the goals and efforts around community stability and anti-displacement.

Yet, down the hall, Leibler and other researchers were talking about how to keep backyard chickens safe from avian flu and how to address Boston’s rat problem. Later a different group of scholars and speakers dove into the complexities of zoning.

That wide range is characteristic of an approach to study that is designed to keep research from sitting on the shelf without being useful to anyone, Lucas said.

Housing it all under the one roof of a conference like BARI’s is more reflective of how people interact with issues, compared to the silos that tend to exist in institutions like universities and municipal governments, she said.

“I’m not saying that it’s problematic; it helps people concentrate on an area. You can go deep — get a bunch of transportation people in one place, and they all go hard on transportation. That’s great. We need that,” Lucas said. “But that’s not how people experience the world. That’s not how we experience the city.”

For an approach to study that has that wide range, O’Brien said it falls to BARI and its conference to make sure all those topics are discussed.

“It’s our job, if we’re going to host the civic research community of Greater Boston, to host all those conversations,” he said in an interview. “Hopefully, the research on each of those topics that touch the lives of the people who live around here can be approached in that way.”

At the end of the day, O’Brien said he felt like his call for joy and for productive conversations was heard.

“I think people took me up on my offer, if you will,” he said. “It felt like folks enjoyed themselves all day and had really aspirational conversations about ‘what can we do right now?’ That was what I was hoping.”