Engaged

Scholarship Trm nghe khng bng mt thy (Observation is the best teacher): Utilizing community based participatory methods to inform social work practice A proposal for a 1-hour workshop

This paper features innovations from a three-year community-academic partnership between a grassroots domestic violence organization serving Asian women and children and a private liberal arts college. The collaboration originated with a vision by the Board of Trustees Chair and the organizations President culminating in an invitation to the presenter to delineate the agencys unique practice perspectives and approach. The overarching questions for the project - mutually determined between the executive team and the presenter, were: What makes the organizations practice culturally responsive beyond its capacity for ethnic and linguistic matching? How does the organization understand and meet the indigenous needs of its client population? The presenter utilized a combination of ethnography and action or community based participatory approaches to answer the guiding questions. This involved monthly, sometimes bi-weekly engagement with the agencys operations and its staff, and included group supervision, programing committee work, case consultation, and board meetings. Capacity assessment strategies were constantly employed to actively engage the organizations staff in all stages of knowledge generation throughout the project . Audio taped recordings of case consultations, and hand written field notes served as the primary sources of data for analysis and discovery. The collaboration led to the development of meaningful, practice-relevant, and evaluation-ready work products for both the organization and the academic. Among the deliverables was an interview protocol that serves the dual purpose of clinical assessment and program evaluation. In addition to these outcomes, implications for evidence based practice, community engagement, and social work education will also be reviewed. The lessons learned from this endeavor offers an innovative, culturally relevant model of community engaged scholarship that translates easily into the classroom. This could be useful to emerging social work education efforts and infrastructure in Vietnam.