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 between constituents and ensures that many voices are valued in research, evaluation, and engagement processes.

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.

To achieve social equity, we work to correct policies that disenfranchise and discriminate against groups and individuals. We must acknowledge histories and address past wrongs to change current conditions of structural racism, gender disparities, and other institutionalized inequalities.

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 concerns, 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 work across sectors and disciplines and use a rich range of research and methods to inform our work. In our collective effort 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.

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. We center the unexpected in an ongoing effort to decolonize knowledge—how we learn, what we value, and who is considered an “expert.”