Uplifting Frontline Voices Through Community Engagement
This article is written by Grace Kwan - Research Fellow at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society. Grace Kwan received their MA in Sociology at SFU in 2023.
I think we can hold two truths at once: the truth that everybody who’s [working in the anti-violence sector] wants to be there and wants to provide the best level of care they possibly can, but also the fact that while attempting to provide that care, they might not have the resources to do so. … And we need to equip people with the resources they need to not only be able to provide that level of care that they wish to provide but to do so in ways that are equitable and just for all, because that’s not what’s happening.
(Focus group participant, frontline worker)
Frontline workers in the anti-violence sector engage in multiple roles to provide a continuum of care to survivors of gender-based violence (GBV), including responding to crisis lines; involvement in safety planning; providing housing, legal, and mental health support; and many other services. Despite their contributions to an urgent public safety, public health, and human rights issue, these frontline workers are rarely recognized or represented in policy deliberations, research, or public media. They work in silence and out of sight.
When we started the Frontline Workers on the Back Burner research project at the Vancouver Aboriginal Friendship Centre Society in collaboration with SFU’s Pacific Institute on Pathogens, Pandemics, and Society, our goal was to bring the voices of frontline workers supporting survivors of GBV to the decision-makers who influence the conditions of their work. Community engagement was prioritized from the inception of the project. In addition to a community advisor, a 7-member community advisory committee made up of leaders and advocates in the anti-violence sector provided guidance and input throughout the various phases of the project, including the development of data collection guides. Public community events helped share project information and research findings and re-engage focus group participants.
One of the main challenges of this work was ensuring that the findings and recommendations made sense for the community members most affected. With more than 80 participants, we were tasked with condensing a diverse range of voices and lived experiences into an action plan that meaningfully addresses sector needs. To achieve this goal, we engaged in an iterative process where we brought drafts of the action plan recommendations to participants in events, then incorporated their feedback.
Across previous research, in our focus groups, and in our key informant interviews, funding was named as a contributing factor to many of the challenges facing the anti-violence sector. Specifically, the short-term, project-based grant funding system that the sector relies on is clearly insufficient and unsustainable. The sector as a whole is chronically underfunded, and this heightens competition between organizations fighting for the same pool of funding when they could be improving coordination between organizations instead. This chronic underfunding and short-term funding causes myriad problems–organizations and workers have to delegate their time and resources to fundraising; wait lists pile up and survivors are turned away from services; burnout proliferates among the workforce; turnover rates rise; and the cycle repeats.
The first draft of the action plan attempted to address funding issues with recommendations to increase funding and create a more collaborative funding environment:
Action 1a: Increase funding allocated to the GBV sector. Any increases should be permanent.
Action 2a: Provide more funding opportunities that encourage collaboration between organizations, moving away from competitive funding models.
OPTION A: Prioritize funding applications submitted by multiple organizations collaboratively.
OPTION B: Adjust more funding streams to require at least 2 organizations to collaborate.
Action: 2b. Develop baseline standards for wages, benefits, and training to include in grant applications.
Our Community Engagement and Research Fellow, Noemi Rosario Martinez, organized consultation events where we facilitated group discussions on this early draft of the action plan with frontline workers at one consultation event and with anti-violence leadership in a second event. Event participants felt strongly that actions increasing funding and reducing competitiveness were important–people were on board with Action 1a. However, some felt that Action 2a, both options A and B, would just add coordination labour to already overburdened workloads for management and frontline staff.
Based on this feedback, we revised the recommendations. We needed to make sure to include an action that represented participants’ desire for a less competitive funding environment, without adding coordination labour. The recommendations on collaborative funding models had to explicitly decrease labour rather than adding it.
In the final action plan, Action 1a became Action 1.1: Increase funding allocated to the anti-violence sector. Make any increases permanent, ensuring stability for organizations and the sector.
Actions 2a and 2b became:
Action 2.3 Collaboratively develop requests for proposals (RFPs) with organizations and frontline workers to ensure RFPs meet or exceed minimum standards for safe, stable, and sustainable
Staffing
Wages
Training
In community-engaged research, participants are not mere informants but collaborators in knowledge creation. Speaking with individuals in the anti-violence sector who are committed to ending gender-based violence, and experiencing their wisdom and hopes for the future of the sector, was a privilege that made our work stronger and helped us grow as researchers.
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