Research in Action

In 2024 and 2025, we piloted several community-led interventions to put our HNS findings into action. Our goal was to change systems to level the playing field – from housing affordability, to community care, to food access. Please see below for details about our pilots, what we did, and what we learned.

Healing Circles: Community conversations for mutual support and healing. Read more about what we did and learned and explore the Healing Circle Guide in English and in Spanish.

Developer Accountability Scorecard: Learn to rate the affordability of new and existing housing in your neighborhood using our data tools. Read more about what we did and learned, download the scorecard in English or Spanish, and learn how to use it (part 1, part 2 (link to come), and part 3).

HIP Ambassadors: Residents who use HIP themselves went to farmers markets as trained “Ambassadors”, to tell shoppers how to use it, learn what keeps them from using it, and test solutions for those challenges. Read more about what we did and learned, access materials to run the program yourself.

Justice Journeys: Projects that highlight community histories of neighborhood change to preserve identity and belonging, and spark action to shape community futures. View the projects and read about what we learned from the New Bedford’s tours and children’s book.

Homegrown Produce: Experienced growers in communities act as “ambassadors,” teaching neighbors to create local food systems by growing their own food where they live. In Roxbury, workshops were run by Nataka Crayton and Bobby Walker. In Everett, the workshops were run by Everett Community Growers (ECG). See pictures here.

Rapid Response: HNS residents + researchers came together to create a way to quickly inform our communities and stay connected during urgent moments. Through Rapid Response, we want to share both specific resources and our process of inquiry to identify them based on what our communities need. We therefore work to compile the questions we’ve been hearing from our neighbors and show how we went about finding resources that helped us answer them. Learn how we used PAR to create and quickly spread information.

Boston PAR Network: A network for educators and housing activists to learn and do PAR together. Read more about what we did and learned, visit the website.

PAR with Tenant Unions: Public Housing tenants unions used PAR to conduct surveys about conditions to support their advocacy. Read more about what we did and learned, access materials to run the program yourself.

Municipal PAR: Using PAR in a municipal (city/town) context to explore how climate change-driven extreme heat is affecting older adults’ lives. Read more about what we did and learned.

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Resident Researchers and Community Partners use our data and findings to better understand their community strengths and challenges and come up with solutions.  They share findings with community members and leaders to change perspectives and  community conditions. HNS Action Projects build residents and community power to make the  local changes that are most important to their communities. Past projects have sparked resident-led work to increase voting, food distribution, control over land and planning decisions, and healthy housing advocacy. 

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The second principle of PAR says that the best way to understand a problem is by trying to solve it. We created the Learning and Innovation for Community Change (LINC) Lab, which allows partners to use the most relevant data and findings to design and deploy projects and interventions that improve opportunities and conditions within and across HNS communities.

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Over the years, the HNS Consortium has received requests from lots of organizations and advocates who want to do community-based research. Some are new to participatory research and want support to learn to plan and launch such an effort. While others are familiar with PAR, but want support collecting or using specific types of data for action. As we know, there are few resources out there to learn the nuts and bolts of doing a PAR project.  

Our PAR Mentorship program provides opportunities for other communities, and community-based research partnerships to receive mentorship and technical assistance  from members of the HNS consortium, including Resident Researchers. Together, we draw on our collective experience to help them to use PAR in their research.

We offer two forms of mentorship: 

1. PAR Consults – provides short-term advice through one to two meetings with our team(PAR consults are by request)

PAR consults answer questions like – “How do I develop a survey with residents?” “How do you analyze results with residents?” “What are options for sharing data back with our community?” “How do we know if we need an IRB?” 

2. Mentorship – provides an advisory team to guide and support groups in applying PAR to a current community-based research effort

PAR mentorship partners are selected by application once a year 

Interested in Mentorship or a PAR consult? Contact us using the form below:

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Over the years HNS staff have worked with students and researchers to help them build their skill, knowledge, and practice of PAR. The Emerging Scholars program provides doctoral students, post-doctoral students, and community scholars with funding, mentorship from the HNS team, use of HNS data and tools to build their PAR skills and knowledge. Funded scholars use these resources to design and carry out a research or action project that helps answer questions that are valuable to communities.

Interested in the Emerging Scholars Program? Learn more about funded scholars and how to apply below.

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HNS residents + researchers came together to create a way to quickly inform our communities and stay connected during urgent moments. Through Rapid Response, we want to share both specific resources and our process of inquiry to identify them based on what our communities need. We therefore work to compile the questions we’ve been hearing from our neighbors and show how we went about finding resources that helped us answer them.